Low Light
by LyingMonsters
Summary: It was supposed to just be one time, that was the promise. Once, with no strings attached, between two people who shouldn't have made the deal for all too many reasons, least of all that they were suspect and detective. Lawlight.
1. Chapter 1

**So, fate has decided to cross the tangled threads of our small lives in this beautiful tapestry that is the universe. In the end, you'll forget me, and I you. But for now, breathe. If that's all you remember from me, I want it to be that I gave you the advice the little voice we all have gives us. Breathe.**

 **Welcome to Low Light.**

 **0o0o0o**

Humans are drawn to light as much as they run from darkness. It is a fundamental part of their nature. So it should only be right that the man should feel this insatiable urge to trap and pin down this Elysium-borne creature that dispelled the darkness until it promised that it wouldn't run away anymore, wouldn't leave him to the shadows of his fearful mind.

But the creature would always escape. He always told himself he would run after his prize, that this time, he would finally be able to leave his awful prison created by the taboos that had been placed upon him early in life. But he was petrified. He was terrified of the creature, and the sensations that would ravage him when it was near.

He desired the creature, craved it, wanted it so badly it hurt. But he had to bear the torture. The creature could never be his. It seemed there was no worse agony than forcing himself to stay away, day after day, cursing himself to hide from the creature.

Light Yagami.

Before him, L had been living his whole life in the darkness. Light dispelled his shadows. And that made him more than human in L's eyes; something precious and beautiful. Because if you're scared of the dark, you reach for the light.

He was nothing before Light. Just a delusional man solving crimes that caught his eye. With him, L was alive for the first time.

He was his Light, but he wanted him to stop backing away. He wanted to trap him, catch him, force him to stay, because he didn't know how much longer he could handle him leaving and taking his life away with him.

He must know. L saw the way Light looked at him. If Light didn't know what L felt, he wouldn't look at him like that. Light surely knows full well what he'd taken, and he is too cruel to allow the detective to become whole again.

We all carry a torch for our first love. And this flame would burn inside him long after Light had left him for the last time; it will blaze, eating him up until it eventually consumes him all.

And maybe in the final guttering of his fire, he will be released from this hell.

0o0o0o0

Is it possible to fix the world with a few names scribbled on a piece of paper? Or is the world too rotten, the kind of decay that holds it's shape on the outside but eats away the inside to hollowness, leaving a brittle, shiny shell that crumbles away if it's touched past a glance.

All humans seem to be shells with nothing on the inside, only facades of crumbling dust and lies, blown about by the winds of fate. And if the wind blows too hard or in the wrong directions, then the husk surrounding every human shreds like tissue paper and leaves them exposed to the uncaring gales.

Right now, the winds seemed to be turning from breezes to hurricanes; he was trapped, being thrown around until he didn't know which way was up, trying to keep a blank face. It was disorienting and painful, and he didn't know whether the next breath would be his last.

But it was also exhilarating, being caught so completely and utterly. Pinned between giving up and fighting again, or being commanded by fate. In secret places, dark and alone, Light wanted to be commanded, to be controlled, to be taken and claimed, for someone to control his every action.

Someone was already doing that. L made sure he couldn't have an unguarded thought, a free moment. It felt confined and yet so different, so exhilarating. It was the thrill of the chase, of being in such close quarters to his worst enemy and greatest friend simultaneously, of feeling chained to a wall.

He wanted L to stop with the foreplay, with the word games, to tie him up until he screamed and begged with the pain for mercy. And L wouldn't give it to him. He would just tighten Light's chains and wait for the next round.

L was sadistic in his own way, and Light wanted him to be exactly like that, a beast who wouldn't understand human pleas for leniency. He might even enjoy Light's pleading.

It was a dangerous thought-if anyone found out-but Light nurtured it in the dark with images and feeling, and it grew, wrapping around him until it sank beneath his skin and became him; there was no barrier between the growth of thought and the young man called Light. It had consumed him strangely. L was all he could think about now.

Maybe one day, Light would step back and look at the thing he'd spawned and wonder what happened, but for now, he was just focused on not letting the detective see what he was thinking.

0o0o0o

If Light rubbed the pad of his finger on the fabric of the couch hard enough, would the skin split open? He imagined blood welling from a ragged break, bright and glaring, pooling along the creases in his palm. Dripping through his fingers to the floor.

L watched Light and wondered again what the brunette thought about. Did their thoughts run the same? Did Light think about circumstance and the roles of everyone he knew, you are my friend, you are my enemy? Unlikely. Light seemed loathe to call anybody his 'friend'.

The sound of pages turning whispered through the room. L had become an expert at turning pages while focusing on the outside world. It allowed him to project an air of distracted unavailability as well as soaking away awkward silence.

'L, I need to ask something,' Light suddenly said, nearly standing up. L pretended to finish his page-with maddening slowness, or so it seemed to Light-and nodded as a bare invitation to speak.

'Do you think any of us are going to survive this?' Light asked quietly.

L moved his head to watch Light.

'This being the Kira Case, I do not.' L looked at his computer, a sudden weight, even though he rationally knew it couldn't have changed mass. His Task Force; they didn't deserve to be killed. Nobody had. If he could just figure out what was happening.

'Not even you, L?' Light asked. The detective tried to figure out what possessed Light to ask. The young man, if he was Kira, certainly would have wanted the answer, but he was always so careful before.

'Especially me.'

Light took a deep breath. Maybe to calm himself, maybe to work up the courage to ask what he wanted; maybe just to savor the feeling of his chest moving.

'L, how much longer is the Kira Case going to go on?'

'Until I or Kira dies,' L murmured, almost peacefully, but Light clearly heard the drained undertones and the implications those few words held, I or Kira, telling him that no matter how strong the obsession, they were rivals first and foremost. That L still suspected him.

Light almost considered saying something, something dangerous that L wouldn't forget. Just because the detective would remember.

Was that what would bring him down? Trying to be remembered, to be noticed, to make L care about anything; because the way he seemed to have given up infuriated Light. The young man wanted his rival to give a damn about something, anything, for once.

 _Why don't you care_ , Light wanted to scream. _Isn't there anything in this world you still have feelings for, or are you such an empty shell that you can't even bring yourself to have an emotion for that?_

0o0o0o

L knew the look on Light's face, his face that showed emotions to the depth of his soul one second, then became a blank page of nothingness the next. It said-no, shouted-that he still cared, cared so much it hurt in the burrowing way that remained, burrs always stuck just below your skin.

That was where they were different. L had given up on everything, because he didn't see a final point. It could be summed up in the question he'd asked Watari when he was very little.

 _'Why does anyone do anything to stay alive when they're just going to die?'_

The elderly detective had looked at him with a lifetime of tired weariness.

 _'Because it's in their nature, L. Humans force themselves to live and care because it hurts, and if they cannot feel pain, humans fear they do not exist.'_

Those words had reverberated in L's head since that day long ago, in the old orphanage, with Watari's eyes infinitely sad. L hadn't understood the sadness then. Now, he did. Watari had wanted the young detective to have at least a few more years without the weight of the world on his shoulders. But L had taken the burden gratefully; and now he protected it in his own way. Regardless, now, he had to. If Kira won, he wouldn't have a world to hold.

L had felt enough pain for a thousand lifetimes. He looked at Light and wanted to ask if Light had ever been alone. The kind of alone that bored through your mind in the darkness, digging holes that filled with thick water.

'I'm going to bed,' he said abruptly. Light seemed like he was going to protest for a second, but appeared to think better of it and nodded.

Their breathing filled the room, too quiet and too loud at the same time. L listened to the steady inhale-exhale-inhale from the other side of the bed. Light seemed asleep. He would turn his head to confirm, but he was terrified of waking the young man up and therefore ruining this oddly precious moment where he'd finally gotten the right balance between imagination and physical closeness.

As quietly as he could, L slid his hand below the covers and saw Light in his mind's eye, with that look, that look that told that he wanted to be hunted, stalked, claimed...pinned below L, eyes clear of deceit and the Kira Case and everything except the pleasure L was giving him.

0o0o0o

It was dark, and L was asleep, and every time Light moved his hand, his heartbeat accelerated in pace. L was so close. This was dangerous. Light was chained to his rival, in bed with him, and having a fantasy that came oh-so-close to spilling from his lips.

If L had known what Light had imagined him as, what would the momentary expression that would cross his face be? Anger? Shock? Disgust?

Light shook those thoughts away and focused more on his vision, of the raven's pale skin pressed against his, lips on his neck; until Light's hands and whispers became L's, and he was no longer alone.

There was a certain kind of euphoria that came from waking up to someone else's quiet, muffled moaning, and L took a moment to savour that feeling. But any sort of appreciation dulled after a while, and L, ever-bored, ever-needing something to pull him from the stupor of life L, turned around to watch Light. If the detective had slept facing Light, he realized, nothing would have happened. But circumstance intervened, and so L was faced with a flushed and sweaty Light, hand moving steadily.

Circumstance is a fickle thing. If it throws two humans together, then, almost without fail, one will break. But these two; these two humans with belief strong enough to blind and an insaitable taste for a god's power. When they collided, they chipped and cracked each other, but neither broke. They wouldn't let themselves, but more importantly, could never allow each other.

 **0o0o0o**

 **And as the chapter ends, I leave you. Our threads have crossed, and now they shall spin away and back into infinity again, as they must. Maybe we'll see each other again? But for now, g** **oodbye; I'll miss you.**

 _ **:: Taking a moment to become intensely aware of how gravity affects every particle of your body**_

 **-LyingMonsters, the one who thinks about threads and eggshells**


	2. Chapter 2

**Hello, again.**

 **Our patterns have fallen on the same numbers again, I see?**

 **Or maybe this is the first time. Regardless of our circumstances, it's nice to meet you. I'm LyingMonsters, quite obviously.**

 **This is the second chapter of Low Light, again an obvious yet aesthetically pleasing thing to state, wherein the Mature rating of this story really comes to play.**

 **Welcome, and please enjoy yourself. This celestial dance is mine.**

 **0o0o0o**

L could practically taste the acrid tang of this tipping point, where he had two choices. Some would say more, but in the end, everything had two choices. You acted, or you didn't. You lived, or you didn't. You chose to continue along the dark claustrophobic tunnel towards the delicate young man with the beautiful brown eyes, or you didn't. And L did.

For a split second, L reflected on the fact that he didn't know who Light was jerking off to. The thought amused him.

'What are you doing? Or, should I ask who did you imagine you were doing?' L asked. Light seemed in shock, sluggishly processing L's words until snapping to alertness.

'Nobody.' L nodded patronizingly, and Light bristled. 'It wasn't you.'

Immediately afterwards, Light regretted saying that-he didn't think he could have made it any more obvious-but L didn't react. Outwardly. For a second, Light indulged in thoughts of what L must be like inside his head. Maybe the detective only showed emotion there; or had he really given up so completely?

But the moment passed; there were more important things to consider, like the amused way L was watching him.

'Who even said I was doing...anything?' Light whispered the question rhetorically, his tone just a bit too fast for L to believe him even as a supposed unbiased judge. L let him wait for just long enough to look away, which coincidentally, was the right amount of time for L to make some sort of a plan that probably wouldn't work.

Logically, if he could challenge Kira across the airwaves and have Light chained to his wrist, L should be able to look Light in the eyes at this moment and not get distracted. But both of those were gambles where he couldn't lose, and this was not part of the great game that was the Kira Case. This was something entirely separate and therefore took a different kind of strength.

Light looked delicate, like he had been shredded and only barely mended. L wanted to fix him, to find every shard Light might have lost and put them all back together to the point where the scars faded by themselves.

But that never happens.

The next best thing would be gilding the cracks and holes, because in the end, they were Light's history and what made him the brilliant rival he was, not embarrassments to hide. But first, L would have to push him to the edge, see how many cracks he had.

L hoped that Light was truly this fragile. It would be entertaining, for lack of a better word, to put him back together, but even more fun to break him.

0o0o0o

Light took a deep breath. Then another, almost choking on the inhale. It was hard to look L in the eyes, but even harder to look away, like the mythical snakes who could mesmerize their prey and make them unknowingly stand still while they were devoured.

Did that mean Light was the prey? Did that mean L was the hunter? It certainly seemed so. The glaze in L's eyes was nothing but predatory lust. L smiled, soft and slow, luxuriously, with the practiced grace of someone who knows their audience isn't going anywhere; whether or not because of their own choices or not was irrelevant. He drew a hand out from underneath the covers. An arbitrary motion if not for the droplets of whiteness that clung to the fingers.

'It seems we both need some form of release from this tension, Light,' L said. 'Could you, somehow, find it in yourself to do something with no strings attached?'

'Are you asking for a one-night stand?' Light whispered. The thought enthralled him. To fuck somebody without the attachments, without the consequences. It was the worst and yet best thing he could possibly think of doing. A bit like L.

'Just for tonight.'

Just for tonight. Just one night.

To have this agreement with L would be violating. Part of Light wanted the relationship more than the sex, but more of him just wanted to be fucked hard and fast by L, just once, and leave it at that. They could do that, right? Sex with no feelings? People did it all the time. It wouldn't matter, anyways, because once the case ended, they would never see each other again. And Light would be left with the taste of L on his lips and too many strings and memories to clean up.

Light was different than normal humans in the terms that he was constantly making decisions he would never be able to step back from. This was one, and all he hoped right now was not that he'd look back and regret it, but that he could do this without leaving part of him behind with L. He hoped L would take care of the piece.

'Fuck this,' Light growled. 'We're both going forget it in the morning.' A little less than a statement, a little more than a question, almost a plea. Please. Because if they didn't forget it, then it would add a thousand more threads to the web of lies they were already tangled in, so thick barely anything short of of death could free them now. They'd hold the tattered shreds around them like a cloak against the world forever, memories of a different time, of this night; just for tonight they would promise to forget.

Just for tonight, when they would moan each other's name into the sheets and, even now, pretend that they didn't have feelings that controlled them more than the other way around. Just for tonight, because this night seemed like an entire universe apart, alone, of not so much lying as omitting the truth.

Without another word, Light's mouth collided with L's in a bruising kiss. That was a mistake. L was absolutely fucking _talented_ , his tongue going from a gentle presence to drawing Light's into his mouth and commanding him with an expertise that demanded, _can you keep up? Are you good enough for me?_ And Light barely could. He was breathing heavily already, and this was just kissing.

Soon, L pulled back, directing to another spot: Light's sensitive neck. His teeth closed on the tanned skin, and Light veritably jumped. It was a sharp pain, followed by a steady, intoxicating burn. He wasn't sure if he liked it yet.

'Do that again,' he said, looking imploringly up into L's dark eyes. The detective tilted his head.

'So you're that type. The kind who need pain to remind them if they still exist...how _human_.' The last word comes out as a bestial hiss. 'I can tell, Light-kun, just from the look in your eyes.'

Even if L was right, all Light wanted right now was more of that slow heat.

'Please. Again.' He closed his eyes and begged with the motion of his body. 'Please, I want more.'

'You can wait,' L responded, almost absentmindedly. He was focused on the beautiful canvas of Light's skin...a blank canvas, ready to be marked. L cautiously placed his teeth on the skin with the hesitancy of someone who has shot a gun exactly once before and is now bracing themselves for the recoil. In some ways, Light was exactly that. A dangerous, beautiful thing that, for now, L could do as he wished with, but would serve another the same. But for now, this was L's weapon of flesh and want, and he was going to use it up.

Light shivered but barely moved, an invitation for L to do as he wished. That was all the permission L needed. He attacked the smooth, porcelain perfection of Light's stomach, marring it with deep purple bruises but staying far away from the border of Light's boxers, his hand wandering upwards to fondle a rosy nipple. Every time, Light jerked and muffled sounds escaped from his mouth, but he stayed relatively still and silent. L didn't like that. He wanted Light screaming, moaning his name over and over. He would remember L, his body would. Always after this.

L suddenly paused, and after a moment's hesitation, pulled Light in closer.

'Tell me what you want me to do to you,' he whispered. Light took a deep breath, nervousness suddenly at the front of his thoughts.

'I want to be...I want to be claimed. I don't want this to be gentle lovemaking. I want you to fuck me until I can't breathe, wear me out, use me up.' Light was breathing harder and harder. 'And no more foreplay. No more waiting. It...I just need something else right now. Please.'

L decided, right then, that Light was right. No more foreplay. That was for people who weren't using their greatest rivals as sex toys. No more waiting, not tonight. Neither of them deserved it.

0o0o0o

'Suck,' L commanded, sliding two fingers into Light's mouth as his other hand pulled the last pieces of clothing off both of them. Light eagerly obeyed, sliding his tongue around the two digits until they were thoroughly wetted with saliva. L withdrew them from Light's mouth and inserted one slowly. Light squirmed, he'd had toys in him before, but nothing that was like this. Only one finger; it was huge and yet far too small at the same time.

'M-more, more, L,' Light whimpered, shocked by the needy tone of his voice and yet unsurprised by the words. L didn't say anything, but another finger was immediately slid inside him, and he groaned at the invasive feeling.

Two minutes later, Light huffed.

'God _dammit_ , L, this is getting us nowhere. Fuck me already,' Light demanded, the end of the sentence draining away as L scissored his fingers.

'Aren't I?' L asked, but tried to finish stretching Light out faster than before.

'Finally, you're- _ahh_ -done,' Light mumbled. L had a sudden idea.

'Open your legs. Now,' he growled. The effect the one sentence had on Light was staggering. The fight drained out of him completely, and he obediently complied, the perfect image of submission. L drank in the sight, nearly pushing his already aroused and hard self off the edge with images of Light's quivering body splayed below him.

'So easy,' L murmured. 'So easy to make you do that for me. You wanted this, didn't you? You were so ready for me to fuck you senseless, you whore, push my cock inside you and pound until you screamed, that you practically laid yourself out on a silver platter. Because it's so simple,' L hissed, 'so simple to make you spread your legs for me, you dirty little slut. And you know what happens to sluts like you? They have to be taught a lesson.'

Light was hard beyond compare, overstimulated from a thousand angles that all led back to L's taunting voice.

'Please, teach me a lesson, I want it,' he begged. His head seemed full of fog, fog and L's smile.

'You're going to remember this one,' the voice said. Then L was inside him, filling him to the brim, like nothing else ever had.

0o0o0o

L planned to fuck Light senseless, blow his mind. What he didn't expect was for Light to be so absolutely tight and hot that he practically pulsed, pulling himself almost completely out and thrusting back into that knot of muscle, over and over again; this was heaven, this delicious silky heat and Light's practically pornographic moans every time he hit that one spot, no, abused it, feeling Light tighten around him _ohfuckyes,_ this was heaven.

 **0o0o0o**

 **Of all the choices you've ever made, which ones led you here?**

 **Can you make a choice that is a mistake if you had no other choice?**

 _ **::Feeling your breathing, your heart beating, and just listening to the**_ ** _rhythm_**

 **-LyingMonsters**


	3. Chapter 3

**Welcome back, to the ones who have returned. Thank you for noticing, for deciding.**

 **The world is complicated, and I can't play out what I believe characters are in shapes forming letters forming words. They're more. But I'll try.**

 **I want to be accurate to the characters.**

 **I want to keep the story going.**

 **Maybe I can be part of the motion, making the last frame not really their end?**

 **That's what I want.**

 **0o0o0o**

Submissive. A word that, under any other circumstances, never would have applied to Light Yagami; proud, unbowed Light Yagami, now looking up through half-lidded eyes at L. Right now, submissive was the only word that applied.

Gentle. He has to be gentle with the creature, now that he's caught it. He has to use a touch as light as butterfly wings. Or it will withdraw from him, hide in the far corner of the cage he's made; never come back. And he will have to watch the creature slip away from him, so close and yet so untouchably far.

Of course, he could simply force the creature out, to play and dance for him. But he can't do that. He won't.

L can see the uncertainty in Light's eyes, hidden under bravado and arrogance. It's faint, but unmistakable, like those pictures hiding an optical illusion. After you become aware of it, it's all you see.

L was gentle at first, barely pulling halfway out before slowly thrusting back in. He continued the agonizingly slow pace until Light was rocking back, desperate.

'Faster…' the brunette muttered, opening his eyes. Light looked perfect, on his back, hair floating in a halo on the pillow, chest and neck marked with bites.

L hesitated, but the thought was far too appealing. He'd already made up his mind. With a grunt, L readjusted Light's ankles on his shoulders and slammed back in harder. Light writhed, tightening, breath shortening, trying to hold his voice in.

'You...fucking...asked for this,' L panted, keeping up the brutal pace, barely allowing them time to breathe.

Light's breath was stuttering. The twisting knot of heat was starting to fold in on itself.

'L, I'm going to cum,' he groaned.

'Not yet,' L corrected, right before two fingers circled the base of his cock. Light whined, cut off from release, to the point where it was becoming seriously painful.

'This was the lesson I was talking about,' the detective whispered. 'You can only cum when I tell you to, no sooner.'

If it was hard before, it was absolutely painful now, with L taking his time on every torturously slow roll of his hips. The detective seemed to enjoy accelerating to a near-breaking point before dropping to a slower tempo, pushing every boundary of Light's endurance.

 _Can you keep up?_

 _Can you?_

'Yes…' Light hissed between gritted teeth.

The agony of the 'lesson' stretched on what seemed like forever. Light came close half a dozen times, but L almost appeared to predict those moments and every time refused to give Light the final push off the edge.

Being suspended forever was worse than falling into the inescapable pit. At least the pit promised death, while this animated nonexistence was torture in it's highest form. The kind that made you drive yourself insane in a way nobody else could.

The time stretched on. Light had practically collapsed. Even L's pace was flagging as he readjusted his position over Light's moaning form.

'Please.' The word was barely a whisper, almost drowned out by the heavy breathing. 'Please, L.'

L paused, watching. Light opened his eyes. They were infinitely deep, stretching back thousands of years to where this act must have been born, out of this same deep-seated urge.

This need to fulfill the urge was animalistic. It was, in some ways, only right to indulge. But in this way, using each other, stretching it out this long, this far? That wasn't right for either of them.

L released the younger, who groaned in relief. L sat back and watched for a second, during which he caught the words that slipped from Light's lips.

'L...I want you...'

 _I want you._

Light's pleasure-laced words had to have been some by-product of this sinful, hasty act. That was the only logical conclusion. They couldn't be anything more. They couldn't, or everything L had thought about Light was a lie. They had to have been a lie.

If they weren't a lie, a delusional outburst triggered by the teenager's hormones, then the detective would have to rearrange his world into something new, something that involved him admitting that Light might just be more than an interest; might be an obsession. A ridiculous, crazy obsession, but an extremely strong one; one that matched the Kira Case: insanity hidden under a polite gaze.

'Light-kun…' L closed his eyes. He could imagine that new world, in the dead of night, alone. Just this one time.

'Please..' Light whispered, into the humming air. L's concentration broke.

'Light-kun, I want you too.' He bent down and kissed Light, not with angry desperation, but with an almost lingering sadness.

 _One time. Just for tonight. We'll both forget it in the morning._

Light could never be his, but just for tonight, he could pretend.

0o0o0o

It had been a slow process for Light to actually realize what side he swung towards. And when the realization came, it wasn't soft. It was a crashing, tsunami-like, wait, so this is why I did that panic that curled inside him and exploded before his eyes.

It had started with that kid; the one who had been moving away, and had been more of an acquaintance than anything else. Of course, Light wasn't the kind to really call anyone his friend-except maybe that little part that said L-but this one was better than most.

It didn't hurt that he was good-looking, either.

Light had passed it off as a high-interest friendship. How Light's eyes lingered around his sharp jawline, his deep-set hazel eyes? How he had pondered over how his dark, chocolate-coloured hair might feel? How he remembered all their conversations so vividly? All normal, all just friend stuff.

Light remembered that night, in his house, when he had called-Light running over faster than might be considered normal-and opening the door to find the object of his interest grab him by the shirt collar and press their mouths together.

Light remembered the look in those hazel eyes right before the kiss ended. And his words.

'I-I wanted a memory.'

It was a memory, all right. One Light would turn over and over and over in his thoughts, polishing it like a river stone, before realizing that he had enjoyed it, and wanted more.

That had been a year ago.

Light didn't remember much about his dash back home or what he did, but it ended up with the final realization that yes, that was probably why he never had a real interest in the interchangeable girls who called themselves his 'girlfriends'.

He hadn't told his parents. Especially his dad. He had kept the secret to himself, sometimes taking it out and pressing it in his hands; a warm, beautiful comfort.

At least he knew why he had such an...an obsession over L. Whether it would be fulfilled or not was a different matter, but one he still knew. Light knew he liked guys. He also knew L was a hopeless chance, even after this. Especially after this.

Second-guessing and doubts were useless distractions; fun ones, yes, but fragile things that never held up to the test of life.

Light's fascination of L was like that, wasn't it? It wouldn't last. It would just get in the way. He had a plan; he was destined for something more. L was a petty irritation who was too damn attractive for his own good. He didn't really mean anything to Light.

0o0o0o

'Come for me,' the detective commanded, and the throaty demand pushed Light off the edge. He came over his chest and stomach with a moan that could wake the dead. L took his time, thrusting slowly a last few times into that delectably tight silken warmth before finishing, his fingers locking around Light's forearms.

For a long moment, everything was silent save the peaceful breathing. L opened his eyes and took his first serious look at Light. What he saw was not the arrogant, brilliant high-schooler, or the childish yet intriguing suspect. He saw Light, just Light, arms flung to his sides, chest heaving, eyelids fluttering closed.

Right now, Light was displayed fully for L to see, and he was breathtakingly beautiful. He looked like an angel, fallen, desecrated by human hands. L's hands.

It would be worth everything that followed just for this sight, this feeling of knowing he'd lured this angel down from it's heavenly perch and taken it.

0o0o0o

Light, pure and untouched by the rotting mess of the world. No boons a shinigami could give him would be able to touch that. There was still some part of the young man called Light, locked away, that was still the unadulterated form humans longed to attain.

This act was, to some, filthy and sinful, but it was the best kind of sin. The kind that satisfied in a way nothing else could. That kind of gratification only came from breaking things that nobody else would dare to so much as touch.

 _I've broken you, angel, Light_ , L thought. _I tempted you down from heaven to dance for me._

 _And you did so well. I'll never be able to take another without remembering you._

 _What have you done?_

0o0o0o

 **Thank you. I know I sound like 3 AM, so the simple fact that you are here and reading these words means a lot.**

 **How many times has someone else had the same thoughts as you?**

 _ **:: Intervals between music when the pauses echo more than the notes**_

 **-LyingMonsters, the one who tries to keep the story from ending forever**


	4. Chapter 4

**Welcome back to this smaller world in a universe of bigger ones.**

 **Come, stay a while, or don't. I've carved out this tiny niche where someone can become someone else for however long it takes to read. Think of it as my gift to you.**

 **Who knows? Maybe the niche will grow, maybe it won't. But for now, this is how it is.**

 **Please, enjoy yourself.**

 **0o0o0o**

Was it wrong to enjoy breaking things to the point where they could never be repaired? Getting off on the fact that what you've put your hands to will never be the same?

 _I've broken the game_ , L thought, _broken it in a way I never thought I would do. What have we done?_

It had surely been a sin to debase themselves that way, but in that moment L couldn't force himself to care. It was filthy, it was absolutely addictive, and it had satisfied him. L regretted nothing about it, except maybe the cravings he knew he was going to experience later. Maybe not that much later.

 _He really is beautiful. A beautiful, dangerous, dark creature. Named Light_.

L chuckled to himself at the irony. Like always, disturbances in the form of thoughts intruded, but he pushed them away and looked closer at Light, trying to imprint every detail of this oddly precious moment in his head. Light's tangled hair, the way his chest heaved with erratic breaths. And especially the lit-up nerve endings everywhere their skin touched, still entwined among the sheets.

It was sad. L had relieved one kind of pressure tonight and taken a heavier one onto his shoulders. Making love was supposed to be a tender meeting of body and soul, and here they were, mere seconds after finishing, back to pretending they didn't care about each other when all they wanted was the opposite.

L wanted to turn on Light and force him to tell the truth about what he was feeling for once, but he also wanted to curl into Light's chest and protect him and in turn be protected from all the darkness in the world.

He made a compromise. He'd forget about Light, about everything that happened that night, and be alone again, but without this scraped-raw feeling that surfaced whenever Light was around. It was so sharp and real, like it pierced the emotional armour L had taken on since the moment he became L the detective and not just L the human who hurt and cried and felt things like everybody else.

L the detective couldn't be distracted by that.

0o0o0o

Light, eyes closed, panting. Mind mercifully empty, because in the aftermath of the act there was nothing to think. What even would he put words to? With the nature, the emotions, the firestorm of retribution that was surely looming on tomorrow's horizon? There was too much to describe and the English language didn't have the capacity to hold it.

Because in the end, it was all a huge tangled web of words, with truth the way to play by the rules but lying an indisputable trump card, unless your opponent could cheat better than you.

The Kira Case was all sort of an elaborate game, wasn't it? With decisions that came back to haunt you as soon as you dropped your guard and assumed they wouldn't. A game that L ignored the rules to like it was his first time playing, when he was an expert.

 _I want to win. I need to win, because I can't let Light beat me._

L, still playing the game by the rules, even though he knew he could lie.

 _I need to win. I am justice, and this world needs me._

Light, trying to win because losing would kill him.

The silence stretched on, each wrapped up in their own thoughts. L rested his head on Light's chest, searching for the steady heartbeat under the rough breathing, and Light's hands were instantly drawn to the detective's feathery black hair.

Feathers. Black feathers, something with those dark feathers that perched like a raven…a memory that kept slipping away, full of errors and holes. Light reached for it too late and the fragment slipped through his fingers like sand.

As he searched, the memory grew fuzzier and fuzzier, until he was unsure it had even been feathers. Or even black, the same shade as L's hair. What had it been?

0o0o0o

Light's hands had stilled momentarily, but now they began to trace a pattern in L's hair. L turned, and Light's fingers instantly stopped, like he was embarrassed.

'Thank you,' L said. He wouldn't use the word 'love' tonight. Love had no part in this. Light paused almost incredulously, then laughed. The sound was rough and broken around the edges.

'For letting you use me?' he whispered. 'For making me realize that I'm never going to forget this, never going to stop hearing you and seeing you and _feeling_ you inside my head?' With a growl, his hands tightened in L's hair to a point where it was almost painful. 'What did you do to me?'

L laughed, and Light wanted to shake him and make him answer, make the man tell him how to stop this obsession that had just grown to new levels.

 _I wish I could tell you, Light, but you've done the same to me._

0o0o0o

Sleep was less rest that night than waiting for the other to fall asleep. L slowly curled more and more into himself, burying his folded body under most of the blankets. Light stared at the wall and tried not to move his hand and hear the clinking of metal links.

The chain. It had been-what? Twelve hours? Fourteen, between the time they had bound themselves together and the time they had been tangled up in each other, bruised from bites and scratches, trying not to moan too loud?

What had happened, unbeknownst to them both, during those few hours? What had changed the from suspect and detective, nothing more but certainly nothing less, to obsessive lovers, and how, in so little time? Or even worse: if nothing had changed and they had been this way all along.

Light closed his eyes to the absolute darkness again and turned back to the writhing pit in his stomach. How did you force yourself to forget someone, especially when it was absolutely imperative to? Because dreaming about someone and having that dream fulfilled past your wildest expectations were two very different things to deal with.

L buried his face in the pillow and focused on the way his breathing felt against the fabric instead of the vivid feeling of Light, everything about Light, especially that tight heat. Tomorrow would be hell, and they'd be walking through it together.

 _Yes, angel, this is the price of falling._

 _So tell me: is it worth it? Is eternity despoiled worth the night?_

0o0o0o

For a second when Light woke up, he thought it had all been a dream. Or a nightmare. He squeezed his eyes shut and held onto the unraveling hope, even though he could feel the ache set in every part of his body and the sting of bruises on his skin.

It didn't work. With a sigh, the young man opened his eyes. L lay curled in his arms, pale chest bare but in no way left unscathed by last night. With a kind of horrified fascination, Light bent closer to examine the marks littering L's ghostly skin.

Bruises look good on him.

Light tried to dislodge the thought, but the truth of it held. It looked like ink, purple and green and blue against porcelain skin, not faded yet and by the look of them, wouldn't for a long time. But for all their unearthly beauty, Light would do anything to see them disappear. L may have looked good with this bloody ink under his skin, but Light remembered what he looked like without them, and he would trade any day.

But for now, Light could enjoy them, especially since he had placed them.

Light straightened suddenly and groaned. Exactly how rough had they gotten last night? Hickeys was one thing, this nearly rib-bruising pain was another. Bracing himself, he looked down and felt dizzy. He looked claimed and used, with scratches on his sides and that deep-seated soreness somewhere further south. Surveying the aftermath was like cleaning up after a natural disaster. L was definitely a storm, all confusion and chaos with a still center that trapped you until it blew itself out.

L was a very light sleeper, and had been jostled awake while Light was examining his bruises, but he preferred to stay quiet and watch for the first while.

'Light?' he asked. Light started, eyes narrowing. After a long pause, he nodded.

'Ryuzaki,' the young man said, mouth set in a neutral line. L shook his head.

'Call me L. When we're...alone.' L held his breath for a second. 'That's what you called me last night, didn't you?' Light tensed, ignoring L's words.

'I'm going to go clean up.'

0o0o0o

Someone was talking, but all that mattered was the chain that slowly swung between the two chairs, the occupant of said other chair, and L's confused thoughts about the two things.

Chains were a symbol of captivity.

And right now, with the weight of metal around his wrist, that was all L felt. Trapped. All his thoughts pinned just below the surface, screaming and writhing, tangling up in each other until he couldn't distinguish between right or wrong, love or hate; Light or darkness. Love causes obsession causes madness.

Light...it wasn't enough for him to rob L of his heart. Light had to steal away his mind too. And the only thing L wanted him to take-his body-is the one Light wouldn't touch. Not again, anyways, which was all that mattered.

...instead he took other's lives.

 _Don't you? Kira?_

Kira. Light. Light is Kira. He'd fallen in love with a murderer.

In love. From a one-night stand; from something. L had thought it over nonstop, and yes, something had changed in his feelings for Light, and that scared him. Light. Light being Kira and all the implications it brought to their…

Their what? They, together, were not anything. Last night had been a mistake.

Mistake or not, he couldn't ignore one thing. Light, statistically, was Kira. L, from what he could make out of the noise inside his head, was something more than detective to but something less than partner to Light. Although some would say they were lovers, L disagreed. That required something that was completely absent from last night.

Why didn't this bother him more? It must be because he didn't want to consider what the implications were. Too childish to take on the mantle of an adult, even though he should be able to.

 _'We'll both forget it in the morning.'_

 **0o0o0o**

 **Thank you.**

 **My niche is here and now. Maybe it'll change over time. Maybe it won't.**

 _ **:: Books, laying on their covers, with dog-eared corners and geometrical patterns in the bent and unbent pages**_

 **-LyingMonsters, the one who watches the blue between clouds as well as the clouds themselves**


	5. Chapter 5

**I wonder about things that should be confined to the universe's musings, and I regret none of the things I've realized.**

 **Welcome back, I'm glad to see you, first time or not.**

 **0o0o0o**

The chain chafed after a while. Light forced himself to keep his eyes on the band of abraded skin around his wrist. It wasn't pretty, but it was better than looking at L. Anything was preferable to looking at the detective and triggering those memories again.

Light soon discovered that slowly twisting the cuff distracted him from anything else. It wasn't a good feeling-it reminded him too much of the constant rattling he'd heard last night-but it felt like the bites and scratches he had taken extra care to conceal with high collars and long sleeves. It was all a matter of relativity. Burning his skin against the metal hurt, but L hurt more, so he took the less painful option.

'Less painful' being the one that would claw his insides to shreds to a smaller extent. It was all a matter of choosing the option that left less scars.

The gentle swaying of the chain was almost hypnotic. Light fiddled with the link that hung closest to his chair and absentmindedly began scratching and tapping the metal against the desk.

Tap, scratch, tap tap.

Tap, scratch, tap tap. Pause. Tap, scratch, tap tap. On and on.

Light found himself falling deeper into the rhythm and it's soothing regularity, like ripples on a shore, slowly carving a world of white noise into the sand. It was peaceful in that little world. It was full of noise and yet absolutely silent. It had nothing to weigh on him. No thoughts, no Kira Case, no detective with feathered black hair and dark, alluring eyes and blue-green-purple bruises hidden on his pale skin.

'Light?'

The pattern cut off with a grinding halt halfway through the second _tap_.

Light was yanked away from the white-noise world and back into one that had all the aforementioned troubling things. L watched him silently. Light dipped his head, trying to fix a look of embarrassment on his face when all he felt was loss at the disappearance of the tap-scratch-tap-tap rhythm.

'I'm sorry, Ryuzaki. I was distracted.'

'Mmm. Anything on your mind?' the detective asked, disregarding the coffee he'd been nursing steadily up until that moment to turn his full, impassive, darkly amused attention to Light. Light lifted his chin and stared back, catching every smirk the raven tried to disguise.

 _Last night, you, us, and that goddamned lie that we'd both forget it in the morning._

'No,' Light said. The word caught slightly in his throat, and he said it again. 'No. Nothing important. Let's just return to the case.'

0o0o0o

 _'Nothing important,'_ L thought, _even though you're so bad at hiding the memories from your eyes? I know you're thinking of last night, and so am I, though I would do anything to stop the images rewinding._

 _And that lie about how we'd forget it? Did either of us truly believe you? Or was it just a failing promise built on the needs amplified in the darkness?_

L nodded, responding to Light's posed question. They could pretend they didn't speak a thousand conversations in the spaces between anybody else's, they could turn a blind eye to the nuances that welled between them and speak in pointless words instead of breaths and bodies.

 _I'll keep playing our game, Light, if only because it's the only thing I know how._

 _But tell me, when can we talk truly again?_

L breathed out and didn't breathe in again until his chest pinched and tightened. He repeated the process throughout the entire meeting. The spaces between breaths amplified Light's pattern.

 _Tap scratch tap tap._

0o0o0o

It ended up with L reliving the night in his head. Time frayed. Seconds either stretched forever or rushed by far too fast, taking L's breath with them.

Light had looked so innocent in sleep. L imagined that when he was like that, he could forget about the fact that he's Kira. And in the end, that's what the detective wanted for him. He wants him to be someone he can love without having that burden on his shoulders.

But that's impossible. If Light is Kira, and he is, he will have to die.

Did it have to end with one of their bodies rotting below the dirt? Couldn't it end differently; for once, couldn't L long for something without worrying it was going to be torn away?

L was no stranger to loss; exactly the opposite. Seeing cases fail, watching Watari age away. A, his first successor. A, who he had pushed too far too often, who he had broken. Because the first generation were prototypes expected to fail.

They had been just children.

They, being A who was only human to crack in the end, and B.

B. Brilliant. Deranged. Full name: Beyond Birthday, but he likes-liked-being called Beyond.

Beyond with those eyes and that need to prove himself that came out too many times and the smirking sense of humor. He'd been a top too. Said so himself. Proved it himself.

Always by himself. He never needed anybody, least of all L.

Beyond with burn scars and a thumbnail gnawed to bloody strips. Beyond washing the mask of makeup off in the sink. He'd loved looking like others, even before he'd run away and became the world's greatest criminal.

 _Beyond, someone else is vying for that spot and they don't even know it. Light and you, brilliant, deadly, beautiful human creatures; you are the only ones who know how to hurt me just right so I come begging, back for more and more and more. You're going to kill me, both of you, both of you, because you're the same thing, the same childish rival that got too far into my head_.

In L's thoughts, Light and Beyond started to blur into the same person. No, not quite 'person'. More like...idea. Of someone who knew they were a genius and reveled in it, in their sureness that everything was going to go their way in the end. In their arrogance and childishness. L reached for that image of his perfect rival and it danced away back into the fearful shadows.

L knew he would never be able to catch the fluttering image, but chasing it and expecting his prize at the end were two completely different things. He could chase and hunt and run after Light or Beyond, and they'd still be laughing at him, constantly out of reach, no matter how many times he pinned them down. They were untouchable, and that made them all the better to claim.

For the short time their threads crossed. Afterwards, they would be gone, disappeared back into the void. Angels with their wings returned, restored to heaven. And L would wait and sing and tempt them back down again, their own dance they observed, because what else did they know how to do?

0o0o0o

'So, we've finally managed to catch a moment alone.' L looked up from the scuffed floor. 'Shall we talk?'

'Talk?' Light scoffed, twisting sharply in his chair to better face the detective. The chain caught on the armrest before clattering free. L didn't flinch, still curled into his crouched sitting position.

'Yes, Light. Talk, because we need to work out what's happening,' L said, the last word curling over to show a sharper underside. Light abruptly stood up. L caught onto the shaking of his hands, the paleness in his face that gave way to an angry flush.

'No. We are not talking about anything. We were both supposed to forget it, that was the promise. Or have you forgotten?' Light straightened and turned away, and instantly, L saw red. Light kept doing this, turning away, ending the conversation, determined to have the last word. Childish.

L grabbed the chain and yanked Light back to face him. The young man stumbled, the awkward positioning of the chain forcing him to drop to his knees in front of L. From there, Light glowered, eyes narrowed, mouth twitching towards an angry smirk.

'Is this better, L? Will you feel more comfortable talking to me when I'm chained on my knees in front of you?' Light whispered.

'Don't you…' L trailed off, his words failing him more by the posturing of Light's body than the brunette's harsh laugh.

'Don't I...what?' Light's eyes glittered like a crow's. 'Don't do this? I could have sworn you liked it last night, or at least that's what I gathered from what you were screaming.'

L tried and failed to speak. Light lifted his head triumphantly.

'It's all a game, and I'm winning. Watching you go crazy over every hidden meaning I miss. Seeing you lose yourself because you're so obsessed over me. Driving you insane today was fun, Ryuzaki. I look forward to doing it again tomorrow, and every day after that.' With a quiet laugh, Light leaned forward and kissed the detective, his hands sliding through black hair to press L's mouth more firmly to his.

After a long moment, Light pulled away and stood.

'Shall we?' he asked with a mocking smile, holding out a hand. L wordlessly rose by himself and started down the hallway back to the conference room.

0o0o0o

They didn't even pretend to be asleep that night. L perched on one side of the bed, wrapped in blankets, Light facing away from him, legs dangling off the side.

'Did you mean all the things you said today?' L asked. Light shrugged, still resolutely staring at his hands.

'Did I?'

L didn't intend to answer that, especially not if Light didn't have the decency to face him. The detective grabbed Light's shoulders and pulled him backwards onto the bed, face twisted into a snarl.

'Did you, Light?'

A long pause, broken only by Light's scoff. 'You've really lost it, haven't you, Ryuzaki?'

L growled, hands twitching of their own accord. Light looked up at him, hair splayed everywhere, eyes mocking, bringing so many memories that L just-

'Ohh-' Light's hands flew to the detective's hair. L snarled again, low in his throat, and bit at Light's lower lip, demanding entrance. Light complied.

The blankets were kicked to the floor, the sheets tangled again. At first, both were content just to kiss, but soon found themselves needing more, something to satisfy.

Light's fingers teased at the elastic of L's boxers, and even through his haze, the detective recoiled.

'No. You-it was one night. That was the promise,' L said, pulling away. Every thought he had screamed at him to go back, to let Light take him, but he couldn't.

'You wanted this,' Light argued, but whatever trance of poor judgement he was in had broken. He didn't move from his position pinned under L's chest, and the elder didn't either.

That had been dangerous. They had come close to breaking, to giving in, and it was imperative that they could never do it again. L knew that if he was given Light like that again, panting and submissive, he wouldn't be able to stop.

0o0o0o

Light adopted L's normal sleeping position-curled up, laying on his side-for the simple reason that he could silently scream inside his head without L seeing it on his face.

Stolen kisses that were never meant to happen, looks and touches and longing. He still wanted L. He couldn't do anything without strings attached.

It was like a spiderweb. The more he struggled to free himself, the more he became entangled with the man with raven-feather hair and abyssal eyes, and all the threads kept crossing in some pattern that made up L, that defined him, and all Light had to do was decipher it.

 **0o0o0o**

 **Late-night is the time when I become more open to ideas I've oppressed before.**

 **Thank you for getting this far.**

 _ **:: The sound of conversations on the wind, when every word seems to be your name**_

 **-LyingMonsters, the one who wonders too late and too long**


	6. Chapter 6

**Quotes are funny and beautiful. I love them.**

 **0o0o0o**

A great man once said: 'You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play the game better than anybody else.'

What's the true game? Everyone seems to be playing a thousand different warped ones.

Who can get the highest position in this illusion-upheld society?

Who can get the most invisible approval from 'higher powers'?

Who can hide what they feel and play by the rules?

Who is the coldest, the one who will betray and turn traitor and shoot others in the back, because it doesn't matter how you got the highest position?

Who plays the game, and who plays the judges to claw themselves higher?

Who is the cruelest? Who can break the other more absolutely? Who plays by the rules until nobody is looking, and then slips poison into the drinks?

Who cries fake tears over the murder they committed until the cameras turn off?

We all want to rise out of the darkness and to heaven, but somewhere along the way, the instructions were lost. Now we dig our own graves while staring at the sky,deluding ourselves into believing that we can fly.

 _Light, if we're playing all those games together, staring across the chessboard at each other, then, my brilliant rival, I think you're winning._

 _Never more have I wanted to lose; never more have I needed to win._

0o0o0o

Light, losing hold. On the time running out, slipping between his fingers like particles of sand. On his thoughts. On whatever lapse of sanity that forbid him from running back to L. On the promise, that slippery shell of a promise. Barely a few words, far from any sort of official, legalized bargain, but it was desperate and held so much on the frame of not being broken.

He wanted to break the promise, but he needed to keep it intact more. Just one time with L had worked it's way inside his head and driven him to obsess over it.

More would satisfy him until the drunkenness faded and the addiction was revealed to be stronger. And then he'd pretend he didn't need another night more than he wanted to breathe safely until he broke and the cycle started again.

He could pretend he didn't want it, and that had to count for something, right?

Light closed his eyes and pressed his hands over his ears to block out the noise of breathing, leaving him alone with his thoughts. His crazy, disjointed, staggering thoughts that were becoming more and more horrifying at every moment.

He wasn't Kira.

He could be Kira.

But he wasn't.

He was.

He was not.

He was Kira.

 _Please just take me away from this place, this awful world where I can't even trust. This world where I keep waking up and realizing all the decisions I made are mine. I don't want that responsibility._

 _I am childish, I am scared, I am not ready to be all by myself in this world full of monsters with nobody to tell me which steps will fall out from under me._

0o0o0o

The sting of knuckles on his skin. The warm flush of blood pooling under the skin. Light raised his fingers to the bruise and prodded the skin detachedly. Even after hours, it hadn't faded.

The fight had been his fault, yes, but he could also securely place blame on a few other factors. L was one. The second was the nightmare he kept waking up into, where, after all his pleading, nobody had come to tell him what were the right decisions.

'Light?'

'Ryuzaki.'

L stared at Light, but with more concern that he naturally showed.

'Light, are you okay?' Light noncommittally jerked his shoulders.

'I'm fine.' The pause stretched. 'Are you?'

'I'll be fine,' L echoed.

What is the difference between 'I'm fine' and 'I'll be fine'? Is it not necessarily the time it takes to put a veneer of perfection over the scars, but the time it takes before people believe you? Or is it that 'I'm fine' is a lie for others while 'I'll be fine' is a lie for yourself?

Which is kinder and to whom?

Light flinched at the sudden cold pressure on his bruise. L withdrew his hand.

'I'm sorry. I…'

Automatic excuses?

'No. I'm sorry.'

0o0o0o

L nodded at the small splits on Light's jaw and knuckles.

'Do you want me to treat those?' he asked. Light frowned, wincing as the small movement stretched one of the cuts.

'Yes, please.' L rose and rummaged in the nearby drawer, withdrawing a bottle and some Band-Aids.

'This is going to sting,' he warned, pulling a pillow off the bed and awkwardly holding it out to Light. 'Just in case,' the detective mumbled, and after a long moment, Light accepted, drawing it close to his chest.

The brunette held his breath as L gently cleaned first his knuckles, then the bruising cut on his face with the rubbing alcohol. It stung more than Light had predicted, and he was thankful for the pillow.

'Light, hold on, I'm almost done.'

The alcohol swab disappeared, replaced by cool fingers and rough fabric.

Light opened his eyes. L watched him expectantly, tensely.

'Are you okay?'

'I...will be fine.'

0o0o0o

'I'm losing it. I'm not Kira. I am Light Yagami, ace student, Kira Case prime suspect…' He looked over at L, for the umpteenth time wondering if the detective was asleep. 'L's _lover_ , oh God…'

Light raked his hands through his hair again and repeated the words that were just now starting to be less than meshed-together sounds and were now taking on ideas, meaning.

'L. Famous, elusive detective. Genius. My prime interrogator, the one who could sentence me to death with a word.'

'He's going to kill me.'

'And I'm his lover.'

Light buried his face in the pillow, forcing the material against his bitten lips. It was a game in itself trying to untangle his biased thoughts from the true-if they were even true-facts about L. And Light knew he was losing.

I'm going insane over every second with him.

L was like one of the sleeping pills people took. 'It's just one, just once.' 'Just a couple.' 'Only a few times.' 'Only occasionally.'

They wouldn't let you sleep without them, so you came back for more. They ended up doing the opposite of what they promised, but you were so caught up in just getting back for 'just one last time' that you never noticed.

 _He's so dangerous, more than sitting on society's throne after you cheated your way to the top. More than justice. More than any power a god could give me. I've become dependent on him._

Just. Once.

It was never just once, Light thought despairingly. No matter what lies he was telling himself now, no matter how much he desperately wanted to believe them, there would come a moment where all his promises broke under the pressure and he crawled back to L.

Light already hated that moment. But he knew it would satisfy him, so part of him hungered. After the second time would come the third, then the fourth. Each time, he would give in quicker.

How many times did you have to drag yourself back until you were 'addicted'? Or was dependence measured in how long it took before you caved?

He wanted to turn to L and ask again. Say he needed more. It would be so easy. It would be a gateway to asking again and again and again.

Light wrapped his arms around himself, like that would keep the words from spilling out.

0o0o0o

L's default response to things he couldn't handle was to ignore them and pretend like they never existed. It worked almost without exception. Other people, with their presence and their probing eyes and their habits of asking all the wrong questions? He could block them out. Responsibilities, to be more than he ever could? He could pretend they didn't matter. And the world, the world full of human-bred monsters?

He could tell himself they didn't exist.

He tried to ignore Light. He tried to put Light safely into the same box as everyone else when he knew, from the moment they had unofficially met across TV, he was anything but.

He tried to ignore the falling angel until the temptation proved too much and he pounced like it was his first sustenance in years. In a way, it was. Light was the first person he saw as a worthy rival since Beyond Birthday.

L had been forced to open that old box, the one that had previously only held Beyond. It was emptier than the detective would have liked. And the emptiness hurt. There could have been so much more. There could have been more memories and words and everything and anything there, but there wasn't.

If he added Light, there could be, but the box being fuller would do nothing to soothe the pain. Old pain at seeing the emptiness again, new pain at everything about Beyond Birthday.

He wasn't ready to put Light in the same category as the deranged genius yet.

Light was still worth saving, even if doing so would take him away from L. L could do that, right? He could let something go and return to being empty again, until the next rival appeared?

There would be no 'next rival'. Light would be his last. The Kira Case would be his downfall, and it would be a fitting end.

 **0o0o0o**

 **Thank you.**

 _ **::The sound of leaves falling**_


	7. Chapter 7

**Welcome, to Low Light in all it's erratic words and ideas, thrown across the great web from me to you. I hope nothing got corrupted on the journey, but some parts do, even before they make it out of my thoughts and onto the page.**

 **0o0o0o**

End: the furthest or most extreme point of something. Come or bring to a final point, finish.

The furthest point; the cumulative crescendo of this convoluted life.

An end to hiding and waiting and only playing the games he could stack the deck for. He'd been good at all the little diversions humans took so seriously. He might have taken them seriously, too, if he hadn't learned that the best way to avoid hurting was to never look like you cared. And the best way to appear uncaring was to put on the mask of an unfeeling monster.

He'd did it, and done it so well he couldn't even tell where the lines of the mask ended anymore.

Without his mask, he fell into things and let them under his skin, into his thoughts. He let them grow into him, let them play parasite and host where neither knew who was slowly killing the other. And then, too late, he realized he was always the one dying and tore himself away, only to find that he took some of them with him and left some of him behind. Now he was less L, the-albeit damaged-functioning human and and more L, the collection of puzzle pieces he'd ripped from others where he knew none of the edges fit together, but it didn't stop him from trying to fix himself.

 _Let me introduce you to this game, where we kill each other with words and broken deals, slowly poisoning each other's minds until one of us falls apart and the other cries to mask their victory. I expect you know the rules, Light, you've been playing it so well already_.

0o0o0o

A suspended hourglass, spinning in front of a morning window with the curtains barely cracked.

Sometimes the sun would glance off the surface, but sometimes it would become magnified by the glass and lance directly into your face; even if you closed your eyes, it was a dancing bright spot on the inside of your eyelids. But then the warp of the glass would turn to darkness and you'd blink away the phosphenes. And the sand was always running out.

It would be easier to just get up and close the curtains, but you couldn't, because you were chained by the wrist to the greatest suspect of a deadly murder case who was, at this moment, sleeping in the same bed as you.

Don't wake up, don't wake him up. Let him sleep, he needs it; let him sleep, because that voice back from when humans were prey instead of hunters is screaming at you, _step carefully, barely breathe, because if you wake this beautiful, dangerous apex predator, your last sight will be the gleam of it's brown eyes turning to red_.

Brown to red, normality perverted by violence and depravity. In definition, the Kira Case.

Who had thought a few criminals having heart attacks could escalate into...whatever this was; thinking a few half-legal moves would win the game for him when his opponent had the ace up his sleeve.

The Kira Case had narrowed from Kira and heart attacks to Light and all the emotional baggage that came along with merely mentioning his name.

Light Yagami, with the _tap scratch tap tap_ habit he'd picked up and the way he'd only cry if he thought L was asleep and the shell he put around himself that was always cracking and eroding away.

 _I can still love the little parts about him, the way his eyes look when he's barely awake and the way he pronounces certain words so I can tell what movies he likes even though I know he would refuse to tell me if I asked, and the way he thinks about things, the way only Beyond ever did before_.

Those things, tiny, insignificant things like someone's movie choice and the way they start sentences and whether or not they mouth the words to the music they're listening to; they've all been romanticized as the things that make you fall in love so much that it's almost like you can't notice them unless you are.

 _This isn't love_ , L thought desperately, _this was a bad decision and more of Light's lies; this isn't love because last time I let love get in the way of my purpose, I messed everything up_.

Because if it's the little things that endear someone to you, then how did L explain that the feeling he got when he saw Light was not from noticing his stance or speech or any of those little quirks, it was the rush of heat and pleasure that curled over itself in his stomach, the kind when you see something you instinctively know you shouldn't, but you can't stop staring.

Conversing with Light was like dealing with the devil, selling your soul not for material gain, but because they'd talked you into believing you weren't good enough for heaven.

0o0o0o

 _Breathe!_

His body demanded it while his mind convinced him he couldn't; no, that he didn't deserve to; no, that it would just be easier to submerge himself in the few inches of sludgy water still left and inhale until he couldn't.

Light's hands were fisted white-knuckled in the already rumpled pillow. He should have been alone. This kind of terror, naked, primal fear and gibbering, irrational _it's-here_ feeling was one meant only for the one who was experiencing it.

It was most definitely not for the dispassionate black-eyed detective who was probably beyond fear and hate and love, all the things that flickered, sometimes like fireflies, sometimes like forest fires, into an existence just beneath the physical realm. He didn't have all those burn scars that marked someone as human.

Light imagined L lifting his head and-would he deliver the line with a smile? Yes, he would. Smiling, the ironic little twist of his lips that marked things language has no words for.

 _Look at me, I'm fireproof_.

Light was different. He felt fire lick along his skin just as intensely-perhaps more-than someone who wasn't caught in in convoluted games that he'd put far too much effort into. And no matter how pleasurable watching himself go up in flames like a risen phoenix was, he couldn't forget that after the euphoria had faded, he was not Light the phoenix, caught safely in the knowledge that death wasn't the last door, but Light the burned and damaged angel with no more than bruises on his back to remind him that once he hadn't paid any heed to the raven-feathered fallen of his kind.

He couldn't blame the raven, it was boring and gray in the world where all the fallen ended up without games to play.

0o0o0o

Light had been gripping the bed's frame so tightly that when he released it, his fingers throbbed. Detachedly, Light examined them, feeling like he held his own heart in his hand. How easy would it be to crush it?

Crush it, and either extract the courage he needed to keep denying himself or to break the last, trembling shadow of a doubt-more of a blind hope, really-that he was hopelessly fucking addicted to L.

'Light, you wanted to talk?' Light nodded without looking up. He'd dragged L out into the hallways after tossing and turning all night. The only thing he'd achieved was to convince himself that holding out against going back to L was pointless. With the nature of the Kira Case, they'd both be dead soon, and all this worrying about whatever L had become to him wasn't going to matter anymore.

'Do you remember our deal?' Light asked. Rhetorically, of course. He knew that night had been ingrained in both their memories permanently, stuck on repeat as noise that would never fade into the background.

L said nothing, but the tensing of his shoulders, the darkening of his eyes were all as obvious a tell as L was probably possible of. Inwardly, Light laughed. If L didn't like Light simply mentioning the deal, he was going to hate what happened next.

'You asked me if I could do something with no strings attached,' Light continued. 'And I can't.'

'Stop.' L's voice wasn't shaky, it was cold and hard and flat as a shard of ice. Light looked up from his twisting hands. L was frozen still into one spot, and his eyes were blank, staring past Light, somewhere beyond the cell wall.

'I know you've been thinking about it too,' Light challenged. L snapped back to the here and now, sitting in the middle of a solitary confinement cell with barely room for a bed, knees pushing against Light's when he leaned forward, moving more by instinct and the sound of breathing then the milky illumination that lit barely more than the planes and alignments of faces.

'Stop, Light. We-we can't do this. Not again.' Drawing his knees under him, L barely resisted the urge to press closer again. Light sighed, and they were so close the exhalation tickled the strands of hair that always fell in the raven's face.

'L, you know you want to.' L shuddered at the sudden change in tone, from shaky mock confidence to a sultry, low ribbon that wound through his head, fogging up his thoughts, and down around his heart and lower, pulling tighter with every raspy breath until it was practically a choke chain. He'd do anything Light asked, and Light knew it.

'L…' Light's hands found his waist and pulled him closer. 'Please.'

A growl seeped up from his throat. Keeping his hands from stripping off all those extra clothes Light was wearing and just having his way with him was hard. Not rocking forward and getting some friction to the ache down south was harder. And stepping back, doing what any respectable person would do was so hard it was impossible. Zero percent chance.

This was the card, the trap Light was playing. He could see the tripwires but made no attempt to avoid them, because the prize he'd get to hold for a few, precious moments before the crumbling floor collapsed would make the fall all worth it.

So L pulled Light to the bed in the corner that was hardly a cot big enough for both of them, teeth and hands eager to remark the bruises that had faded. He would reassure the world that Light Yagami was indeed his.

 **0o0o0o**

 **Deals usually benefit one person by feeding off another. This one? Neither L nor Light will walk away thinking they're the victor.**

 **However, they won't think the other has bested them, either.**

 ** _:: Losing your train of thought in the spaces between those arguments that are waiting games_**

 **-LyingMonsters, the lost one who wanders to find deeper secrets instead of ways to escape**


	8. Chapter 8

**Writing: the activity or skill of making coherent words on paper and composing text.**

 **Writing: to show others a world you were previously lost and lonely in.**

 **0o0o0o**

Bite. Scratch. Claim. Hands tearing away clothes, friction, tongues laving across reddened skin, moans amplified in the tiny and previously quiet room, and the heat, that heat that had drawn both of them in like moths to a flame and welded their wings together, _more, goddamnit_.

Slender, pale hands with tapered fingers, usually so careful and precise, now desperately scrabbling against skin and discarded clothes they hadn't bothered to throw far enough away, wanting, longing for more, now, now, _now_ even when his prize was laid out before him and they had all night.

It'd never be soft and slow. It'd be this panting, needy, wanted-yet-despised bond every single time. They couldn't trust that the other wouldn't run away one day.

It was impossible to escape even if they had wanted to. There were a thousand gossamer strings between them, not so much linking them as trapping them in a spider's web together. Cellmates, not roommates, and they wouldn't tell the other what crime they were in for.

It must have been bad, though, since not even the wardens would look them in the eye.

The metal chain between their wrists wasn't necessary, not really. They'd stay together because even though dealing with the sparks that arose when a detective and murder suspect clashed was hard, not having those sparks at all was worse.

If L couldn't feel the fires from fear or anger, then Light would make him burn another way. Love. Lust. Tear him apart, turn his mind inside out and examine every thought as it became more and more intricately chaotic and bowed towards the angelic young man with eyes that were sometimes red and sometimes brown.

They didn't need words anymore. The first time had been sloppy kisses and stumbling hands, all clashing edges and accidents. They were mapping each other's bodies. Now they knew every contour and sharp edge to avoid or trace fingers along like it was their own. They danced together, wielding razor-sharp swords in an elegant kata instead of rusty knives, a guerrilla attack, their first fight in a century.

Who knew if they were fighting against each other or the demons that swarmed the edges of the ring.

Blue-purple bruises that had faded to yellows and greens, yet still obvious on L's skin. Black hair matted and messy and woven through Light's fingers in familiar patterns. L, or Ryuzaki, or whatever he wanted to be called during the times when he didn't look like _this_ , throwing his head back and moaning so deliciously. His lover with raven hair and shadowed eyes, his L who barely smiled except for when he was too far gone, and then looked like a death god.

His, mine, yours again. Grab my hand and be careful of all the secrets and burns I hide there, as I'll be careful with yours. We'll sword fight a demonstration the gods will notice, and then we'll burn to nothing and scatter ashes in the wind.

Watch me, come with me, alone and screaming in the dark. You're not fireproof and neither am I.

0o0o0o

Some people are like firewood, waiting to be consumed. Once, we might have had a different promise in our future, but now we simply wait for the person who will set us alight.

And it's always the one you don't expect, the one you make a pact with to warn you of the fire. And you get the warning. It's a bare whisper of seductive mischief in your ear before the flames lick up your spine.

'Do you even know the kinds of things I want to do to you?' L tugged at Light's lower lip with his teeth, eliciting a deep growl from the brunette's throat. 'I want to make you scream so loud that you wake the entire Task Force. You wouldn't be able to speak for days afterwards. And that's good,' the raven chuckled, 'that's good, because I want to be the only one who hears your sweet moans when I make you lose control.'

'And these…' L traced the healing bite marks littering Light's collarbones. 'I wanted to put them higher. I wanted your neck covered in scratches. Everybody would see them. Maybe here.' The faintest brush of teeth on skin at the notch where his neck and chest met. 'Or here.' The sensitive spot beneath his ear. 'Or maybe here, where I'd force you to keep your head up, revealing it all day long.' At that, the slight pressure on the delicate front of his neck increased. Light whined, imagining himself with marks people would stare at, reddened skin the Task Force would whisper about, and all he would hear was L's quiet laugh.

0o0o0o

Watari had warned him once never to form Pavlovian responses, especially to people. Having 'triggers' that were 'moving, living, breathing, thinking machines' was 'self-destructive' and 'risky'.

L hadn't listened to any of that. He had responses to candy, to sitting in certain positions, to numbers and patterns and millions of other things. He became less and less of a willful machine with every reaction, and he didn't even care.

Now, though, he should have listened, because Light with his arms tangled up and half falling out of the sleeves of his jacket and hair mussed was breaking down all the burned scar tissue he'd so carefully built up against those memories. Hours and days of hoping and waiting for the pain to fade, for Light to easily tear them apart like the deadly thing he was.

This is what he had to look forward to, every time he saw Light with pure, glazed blank brown eyes, or his hair messy, or his jacket askew? It had just taken two times and a damn ton of fantasies to ingrain the neural pathways in his brain.

Question: Just how addictive was Light Yagami?

Answer: Enough to drive someone insane? Enough to make them crawl, begging, back for more before a week ended? No, it was enough that a single taste would kill you…

...but slowly. Very slowly, like oxygen corroding a knight's shining armour. So slowly, you'd already have done all of the above many times before you realized the drug Light was injecting into your veins was liquid pleasure mixed with poison.

Moaning filled the room, steady and keening.

'You sound so good,' L whispered, sliding slickened fingers in and out of his lover-he'd accepted the word and everything it implied; he had no reason to deny himself the title any longer-searching for that ball of nerves that would make those sweet noises double in intensity. Light's toes curled in the sheets and his voice crescendoed.

'There, there, please-' The words ended in a strangled whine. Light's eyes opened, and for a ridiculous second, L could imagine himself seen through those sometimes-red, sometimes-brown irises.

Halfway to completion, and clearly desperate. Eyes wild and frenzied and needy. Shaking body barely supported, chest heaving, staring at Light like he couldn't believe what he was doing but had less than no intention to stop.

Pulled apart like a knot tightened past the breaking point, a tangle of strings only complicated and impossible to unravel from a distance.

The detective looked completely undone, and it took L's breath away.

To Light, he was a challenge, a rival, some ethereal, otherworldly opposing player who relied on psychological taunts more than his own moves in the game. Not the antagonist. Not the protagonist, either. There really was no good and evil in the Kira Case, just two sides and the looming referee of Death.

Light's eyes opened, a smiling, dangerous invitation to read what he was thinking.

 _You say you're fireproof?_

 _I'll be the pyromaniac to give you your first scars._

Death raised his hand.

 _Point._

0o0o0o

Light was tight and hot and his muscles fluttered around L's cock, seemingly intent on milking every last drop of pre-come and drawing forth that long-awaited finish; oh, he could imagine coming inside Light, filling that clenching hole with white, making the young man scream as he was flipped onto his back and L's tongue delved back inside him. Everybody would hear them, have known what they were doing, and dammit, the thought shouldn't have made an extra whimper slip from L's mouth as he pushed back inside, but it did.

'You're doing so well.' L pressed a kiss to the back of the brunette's neck, pulling Light's narrow hips closer and sheathing himself fully. Light cried out weakly again. The Kira suspect was quivering, eyes unseeingly staring as L drew patterns on his tanned skin with the tip of a finger, whispering reassurances, you sound so good, you're so beautiful, Light.

'Let me come,' Light begged, twisting his head around to gaze, nearly drunk off the pleasure and overstimulation, into those dark eyes. L nodded, and leaned forward to accept another deep kiss, his pace falling into a steady rhythm.

'Come with me, then?' L asked. The question was all it took, that soft, dark tone and the feeling of fingers twisted into his hair. The world went white and blank, and faintly, he heard L's finishing scream.

'You were so good, Light.' L tugged the young man closer to his chest. Light inhaled the rich, smoky scent, swirling in a quieter, calmer world then the one he had left. No buzzing in his ears. He didn't need a pattern to lull him to sleep, not with the bruised arms around his and soft, swollen lips resting on his forehead.

He almost didn't catch the words that L whispered against his closed eyelids, fainter than sound, more akin to vibration.

'I love you, Light.'

0o0o0o

L was screaming, and nobody heard.

 _What have you done, angel, Light?_

 **0o0o0o**

 **Writing: to realize that, after years alone in a world, there is laughter in your ears, and a hand taking your own.**

 _ **:: To be so immersed in a book you forget you exist on the physical realm**_

 **-LyingMonsters, the one who isn't completely alone**


	9. Chapter 9

**Would you trade your soul for anything? Or nothing?**

 **What if you could know the repercussions?**

 **What if you sold your soul in exchange for the ability to see what would happen because of that decision?**

 **It's a paradox.**

 **0** **o0o0o**

The chain was a promise. Not an alliance. More a truce on one side not to claw out the parasite in their brain and an agreement on the other not to corrupt any thoughts too thoroughly. But if either side steps over the line, then the claws sink in and the memories warp and fade. The animal collapses to the ground and the parasite heaves it's final breath.

Then the night, the night when they both broke, rules and morals and made too many deals to remember, except for the one. That it was one time. That night was the moment of softness, of weakness, and the parasite started to dig and burrow it's own passages where there was none and collapse familiar, torch-lit tunnels through the darkness.

L had asked for his mind back, the one that wasn't haunted by his Kira suspect. The parasite had laughed.

 _You thought this was your castle? Didn't anybody tell you that only humans stay their own slaves forever?_

L's mind was his sanctuary. It was a place to escape and convince himself that the monster was still in it's cage when he could feel it breathing down his neck. A place to say things he couldn't. Somewhere alone and silent and separated, even from his breathing and heartbeat and all the other noises that told the universe he was alive.

It was no longer his fortress, but his jail. And not only did he not possess the keys, there was none. There wasn't a magical escape route that would return everything to how it once was. L had to exterminate the plague and then rebuild.

But would he, the detective wondered, would he be able to return to how the passages were, when he'd become so obsessed with stalking the new ones, searching for the source of the sickness? Did he even remember how it felt to walk in places he considered his and his alone?

Did he even want to go back to the halls being so silent, he considered his heartbeat a disturbance?

0o0o0o

Light stirred and coughed in his sleep, and L loosened his grip around the young man's neck in surprise.

'Sorry, Light-kun. I didn't mean to try to kill you.' L paused, rewound the words in his mind, and laughed. 'I didn't mean to start the Kira Case, either. I didn't mean to end up like this with you.' The laugh ended up bitter and burnt out and broken. 'I didn't mean any of this. We are all accidents, and you were the best and worst mistake I ever made.'

His fingers dropped back to Light's neck, hovering in a familiar position, matching each finger to the bare impressions.

0o0o0o

Light kept his eyes closed and held his breath as L's cool fingers pressed gently back into their former positions. For a second, he thought L was actually going to try to strangle him, for real, not the accidental tightening of his fingers that had happened earlier.

There was a difference.

'Wake up and tell me that this was all part of your plan-or that you were playing with me, or anything. Tell me you don't lo-don't care about me.' A heavy breath. 'So I can stop wondering. Please.'

It would be easy to open his eyes, sit up, and do exactly that. So easy, Light found himself doing exactly that until the words stuck in his throat and L was staring at him with eyes as blank as river stones.

'Do you?' L asked.

'I…' Those dulled eyes, the awful grinding pain of knowing that _this_ particular type of game was always going to be their aftermath, a mess only they could clean up. And they never would.

'I don't know.'

L scoffed, hands twitching.

'You do. You know perfectly well what you feel. You're just lying because you want this game to keep going.' Silence. 'Am I right?' L demanded.

'Do you know, either?' Light challenged, shaking. L went quiet. Light thought he was going to say something like 'This is why I suspect you as Kira, the way you answer questions with more inquiries', but the detective didn't.

'No.'

They stared at each other across the space of less than the air it took to breathe.

'Can we pretend we're normal?' Light asked. 'Just for…'

'Tonight?' L tried out a sardonic smile, but it turned out a bit more honest and sad then he was comfortable with. 'Yes. Yes, I'd like that. It's not like pretending to be asleep is going to fix any...less problems.'

Light buried his face in his detective's dark hair and closed his eyes. L's fingers drew concentric circles on his shoulder blades. The repetition was soothing.

'I wish I could stop this,' L said softly, speaking more to himself than Light. 'The Kira Case. I hate seeing you like this. I want you to just be...Light.'

 _I wish things too, L. I wish you could sleep well and not wake up screaming moments after you're finally able to nod off. I wish you didn't have habits that destroy you; I know you hate them, I can see the look on your face when you look at your ragged nails or the fingernail-scratched tic-tac-toe games that always end in ties on your forearms. I wish you weren't so sad and broken inside-I wish I could fix you_.

'I wish I could be fixed, too,' L said. Light started.

'Was I thinking aloud?'

'Yes.' A soft chuckle. 'You noticed all of those things?'

'Yes. They're hard not to.'

'You'd be surprised how many people are shocked when I tell them I bite my nails or always want something in my hands. We notice the tiny, romanticized things, don't we? If shredded cuticles and reddened chicken scratches can be called romance.'

'It's as good as we're going to get,' Light joked bitterly.

L leaned forward and gave Light a soft kiss.

'No sarcastic humor right now. No dark jokes with hidden undertones. No deep talks about endings. We're trying to be normal, remember? And normal people don't do that.'

Light smiled. 'What, we have rules now? And how would you know? Unless you've been with someone before me.' It was meant to be a playful jab, but L's eyes went blank for a second before returning to the present time. Light felt the jolt in his stomach that came from looking at old pictures of people you told yourself to forget. Old pictures, from the time when they looked at you like you were their sun and moon and stars.

'Was there another person?' No answer, blank eyes again. 'Was there?' Light hissed, challenging, angry and confused at himself for being so.

'One.' L's voice was flat and eerily calm. His eyes still looked far away, removed, like he had to escape somewhere else while delivering the words. 'A long time ago. They're dead now.'

0o0o0o

'They' went by the alias B, or R, or Rue Ryuzaki, or Beyond, or anything but Beyond Birthday. 'They' were dead from a heart attack January 21, 2004. 'They' had been someone determined to make L blame himself for every breath he took after he heard the news. Not on purpose, of course. Just by making L love them and then ripping it all away. Making him feel guilty that he couldn't save his supposed protege and let him watch the sunset one last time.

0o0o0o

'No deep talks about endings,' Light whispered, a line of chain he could grab to haul himself out of the depths. He'd have to climb under his own power, with the cold, rusted metal biting into his palms, and the above world might have been sometimes too sharp and present, but anything was better than sinking ever deeper into his numb memories.

'That was your rule, wasn't it?' L was still clawing off the old shroud of cobwebs-so easy to don, so hard to remove. Must be all the trapping threads, he mused-and forgot to answer. Light brought him back with a gentle touch.

'Yes…?'

'So no talking about them. I'm going to add a rule for that. No talking about the past. No talking about anything except for us,' he added.

'No being suspect and detective,' L offered.

'No Kira Case?' Light asked. L stopped, then nodded vehemently, almost frantically.

'No Kira Case. No mentioning it. No thinking of it. We're somewhere else, another universe where the Kira Case doesn't and never will exist. Somewhere where we're just normal people, and talking normally is something we're capable of doing.'

'I like this universe,' Light said.

Someone found a pen, and the rules were written on skin. L's messy scrawls full of curls and fingerprint smudges, Light's fast and slanting cursive underscored by horizontal scribbles, like a childish drawing of a tornado. They wrote out the guidelines to their own kind of normality and sealed the contracts with soft kisses and laughter.

'Light, that tickles!'

'It's your turn to write next.'

'You do realize that everyone will see the words?'

'Let them see. And we'll stop as soon as we can't come up with any new ones.'

They would always come up with more rules, more holding threads in the formerly tenuous web to keep themselves alive and above the rotting mess of the world.

So many standards in the universe they had all to themselves to keep the illusion operating smoothly. All illusions need rules and ordinances and laws, or else it collapses and buries itself under the dust. The smoke cloud covers up the feeding of the next empire.

But the difference between a society's illusion and this private world's illusion was that in one, the inhabitants were fully aware of their restricting rules to the point where they could mock them.

Shackles in blue ink and words, written where flesh formed pleasing angles or around fingernail scratches or anywhere their chain touched, which was everywhere. Irons that freed instead of trapped. Or maybe it was the comfortable knowledge of being locked inside a prison of their own making.

 _Our pasts don't exist and don't matter_. Full of desperate loops and whorls, scribbled across Light's back and crossing his shoulder blades.

 _We didn't end up together because of the Kira Case_. L's forearm and fingers, Light being careful to avoid the scratches.

 _We can talk normally_. L finished the 'y' on Light's collarbones with a slash.

 _No more games_. Angry, dragging, deep-set lines pressed like brands into the pale skin covering L's ribcage.

 _No Kira Case_. Everywhere. Anywhere there was space, the words were twisted to fit.

Underlined and bolded and traced over again and again until the blue ink started bleeding out in tiny lines and formed a web. L pressed his hand to Light's chest and imagined that the lines that ran off his fingertips could connect him to his suspect, his lover, his Light.

Angels, wings halfway between stripped and restored, covered in inky chains to keep themselves together.

The pen was running out of ink. The last note was written on their hands, and apart, it looked unfinished.

 _A prison as large as the world._

 _Does it matter if you can't escape?_

'Goodnight,' Light said. L curled into his arms, his twenty-so years disappearing and turning him back into a child. A child with eyes clear and wide and most importantly, here, instead of trapped inside his head, dragging himself up a chain to climb out of old thoughts.

 _Goodnight, go to sleep, and I'll wait until you wake up. Not necessarily the morning of the next day. Rest as long as you like; I'll sit here by the side of your bed and chase away the monsters._

 _Please, do the same for me?_

 **0o0o0o**

 **Are paradoxes possible, or are our actions already woven into the timeline?**

 _ **:: The shiver that goes up your spine and tying it to certain actions; expecting the chill and feeling empty when it doesn't appear**_

 **-LyingMonsters, the one who wonders if humans or free will are paradoxes**


	10. Chapter 10

**Deals never work. Not if they're even. Nothing functions for long when no power differences exist.**

 **Power plays exist to keep the game running.**

 **The game always has to be running.**

 **0o0o0o**

The word. It must have been dangerous; what else could explain the way it lingered on the closing syllable of every sentence and especially their names, hovering forefront in their minds at any moment, yet never became substance?

'Love', that deadly, binding promise. Some people thought it was a promise to care, forever, for someone. And maybe, for some people, it was soft and warm and comfortably deep like that. Maybe there was different kinds of love. Not platonic differentiating from romantic, but all the varying ways of experiencing the stuttering of your heartbeat when your thoughts forced you to look back and say, _that one, I want that one to be my absolution after I do things I shouldn't to get to them_.

This form of love was dark and had hidden folds to fall into and more than two sharp edges. And it burned and branded them. Just another way to make sure every conversation, every look, every second together wouldn't be forgotten.

You couldn't step back from that kind of love. Call it obsession. It sank it's teeth in and held tight; try to pull away and you'd leave part of your heart behind. You'd always leave something, because you couldn't stay in that kind of love forever. Leaving was painful, but it wasn't a death sentence, unlike obsession.

Fire burns if you stand too close, no matter how much you protest that you're invulnerable.

0o0o0o

 _Die, if you want, but don't you dare forget me_.

Artists carve human faces into stone because their sculptures will outlast them. The fragile human image chiseled into the everlasting bones of the Earth is a cruel joke, the most ironic plea to think of the future full of things that might be and say, 'Remember me, remember all the ways that disappeared when humans are dust in the universe once again.'

0o0o0o

You are mine, Light said. Every mark and left on your body is one I placed with a cruel touch. I know it hurt, and didn't I let you scream out the pain? Darling, it had to be, so that the impressions would never fade.

I'd say I'm sorry, but the sight of you, unbreakable, undefeatable L-or so they say-burned by your own decisions is too inviting. I'm really not. Just like you aren't for the identical in pain but worlds different in nature spiderweb lines you left for me.

You'll never forget me, unless you cut out every last scar I left. And you won't, will you? To others, you'll say that losing that much of yourself isn't worth it. Isn't worth me. To yourself, you'll say the same. But when I drag the truth out of you, you'll tell me it's because you want to remember. That you loved the ache from years of looking in the mirror and seeing the signatures I carved.

Right now, we're going to walk outside these doors and this room with the cot that barely held last night. We're going to go back to pretending.

Pretending, but not like last night. We're returning to society's illusion, and ours, but the kind that dulls the red-hot edges where we clash, not with ice water, but by smothering under layers and layers of clothes and pointless rules and words.

Like we're little kids again, little kids pressing buttons and flipping switches. Some connect to nothing. Some connect to nuclear bombs. And there's that one, high up on the wall, that kills us both. None of them do any good. And we know it. So why do we still play?

Because the sounds the buttons and switches make when activated form some sort of pattern. Notes in a song. What's the song?

Maybe there isn't one. Maybe we're all just trying to explain why we're here, trying to see patterns when there is none, because humans hate it when we can't see patterns.

The noises just sound good.

0o0o0o

'We should take these off,' Light said to the words on his skin. Again. He'd been repeating himself, trying to work up the courage to actually act. Good thing he'd said the word 'should' and not 'will'.

'We should,' L agreed. 'Only the ones that we can't hide…?'

'Yeah.' Light absentmindedly rubbed off an errant trail of ink from the soft joint between his thumb and fingers. It came off easily. When he'd woken up, some of the words had already erased themselves. Maybe they should have used a permanent marker, the kind with the narrow, biting tip, and told everyone the lines were veins bloated by poison.

How many people would believe them?

A cool cloth traced over the back of his neck. Light reached a hand back to stop it, but not because it was cold or L's touch was the exact opposite.

'Tell me the words you're erasing?' he asked. L nodded. He didn't look down before reciting.

'No playing games where we can be winner and loser, or both, or neither.'

'I remember what you did when I wrote this one,' Light mumbled, face mostly hidden in L's hair. His fingers danced over the detective's narrow hip bones, dipping into every channel and valley. 'If we had more time, I'd keep teasing until you made those sweet sounds again.' A ghost of a smile. 'Shall I recite it? 'When we fight, we shoot to kill. That makes it realistic.''

'I remember that one. I remember all of these. I remember writing them and imagining that the blood underneath my paper would bring the rules to life, as something more than just ours.' L pressed a kiss to Light's collarbones, exactly where he'd just erased the slashed tail of a Y. That rule, 'We can talk normally,' one of their first. 'Something other people would acknowledge.'

L felt like every stroke he erased brought their universe down, just a little bit, loosening one of the strings that had held them above everything and everybody else. If he kept going, they'd fall. It felt wrong. But it was necessary.

If he closed his eyes, the fireworks showed the impressions of where blue ink used to be; where blue ink could be again, if the angel agreed.

Light looked different without his inked-on shackles. Like he'd grown used to holding the weight, and his hands shook and fidgeted without the stone to shoulder.

L's bruises still hadn't healed completely. Delicate skin, like the petals of a flower that blooms once a century, and, once it's breathed it's first and last of the night air full of promise, it dies.

Light could imagine L with poison-yellow daffodils woven through his hair, smiling as the toxins worked through his blood and forced their way out through red-stained teeth.

 _I pray you haven't completely unraveled the bindings that trapped you yet. If I was the one to make you claw your way out...then I'm sorry; I'll try to make your few days without plastic wrappings around your heart unforgettable_.

0o0o0o

 _We're going back to the case again_ , his conscience said, _back to Kira_. Light distractedly ran his fingers over the keyboard, wondering how the letters hadn't worn with Ryuzaki's typing style and his own _tap scratch tap tap_ habit.

With a start, he looked up from the screen he wasn't paying attention to and back to the Task Force he was-with one notable exception-paying even less attention to. Someone was talking about Higuchi and Matsuda and-there was that goddamned rattling noise, it was the well-worn key in the lock to drive him insane. Light strained to pay attention to the words and make out more than droning chatter.

It didn't work. With a weary sigh, he let go of the fraying tether that connected him to the here-and-now and let himself drift among all his jumbled thoughts. At random intervals, he swam out of the chaos and offered an opinion on whatever fragment of mundanity he'd caught onto before sinking back down to the Herculean chore of sorting a hundred, a thousand, a million different variations of one thought.

It would take forever. It would take longer than forever; his task would outlive his body and mind and memory.

The meeting did not last forever, though, and Light very quickly ran out of reasons to be staring aimlessly at his computer when he was alone with L.

'What's wrong?' L slid his chair closer. Light absentmindedly tapped at the closed lid of his computer and felt the raven's hand on his back.

'I'm okay,' Light said. He hoped the not-quite-lie was out loud; right now, he wasn't sure. L's arms found their way around him, and the detective's quiet breathing ruffled his hair. But all very cautiously.

'Am I allowed to do this?' L asked, not meeting his eyes. 'Now that we're...we don't have the 'just one time' rule?'

'You're allowed,' Light said, and heard his voice reassuring him. Neither of them mentioned what L had meant to say. The end of the sentence was too terrifying.

What are we? Just firewood, matches, deals to use each other. What is a suspect to a detective more than a neck in a noose, what is a detective to a suspect as more than the one who will pull the lever?

0o0o0o

They'd disappeared into one of the side hallways in the middle of a meeting, spurred by Light's quiet whispers of ' _let's just leave, right now, screw the consequences_ ,' every few words underscored by hands brushing underneath the table.

What did it matter if they couldn't put words to what kind of love they had? It was definite, it was real- _look, it's sharp enough to cut_ -and it was burning and hot and swirled around every breath as they kissed.

'You're beautiful,' L panted, licking a slow trail up from Light's neck. The brunette keened, pressing a hand back on the wall. 'Shh. Quiet, remember?' L said. It was so hard to keep himself from decorating that flawless, swan-like neck with bites, and Light was making good on his promise to tease, those lovely hands brushing over every inch of his hips, like he was writing again.

'I'm so glad we're allowed to do this,' Light said. The wall seemed unnaturally frigid, or maybe his hand was burning up, regardless, the immovable wall was bitingly cold on his palm and L's body was all quick, desperate movements with a steady command underneath. The excuse they had given wouldn't last forever. Their time was most likely almost up.

'Me too.' L subtly pulled away and looked Light in the eyes. 'So, are we…in a…'

'It's safer if we aren't,' Light said. Safer because a relationship is commitment, is true love, is promises, and they couldn't even say 'I love you'.

'It's safer if we aren't, but I want to be with you regardless.' This was dangerous, this was everything opposite of single nights in the dark together and red-hot clashing edges and I-love-you-I-hate-you and lying games. This was breaking the deal-shattering it, and the broken glass pieces would cut them if they walked together. This was everything they weren't and didn't deserve in a world full of rules and the Kira Case.

Light pressed a kiss to L's lips and whispered, soft as raven feathers, so quiet it was almost like he didn't want L to hear, ' _I love you_.' Silence, silence, and then the return of a kiss and hands moving up to tangle in brown hair and the response, just as quiet and forceful, ' _I love you too_.'

 **0o0o0o**

 **A soft place to fall, a safety net with strings that don't untangle and fall apart. Only a few people can fulfill those roles for each other, and maybe it takes a killer and a detective branded with hate and love to do that.**

 **You can trust your enemy to kill you, you can't trust your allies to not turn around and stab you in the back.**

 **Or can you?**

 _ **:: Old texts with someone you loved, when you talked in full sentences before something happened and you either broke apart or fused together**_

 **-LyingMonsters**


	11. Chapter 11

**I wonder, I wonder, what really happens in other people's heads when they hear your name?**

 **Who are we, to other people?**

 **I want some things to be happy, so I write them so they can be. Why? Because it's easier and harder at the same time.**

 **0o0o0o**

Pressed together up against some side hallway, kissing a perfect mix of desperate and steady. Every slide of bared skin on skin was hot and satisfying and underscored by teeth tugging on lips and hands braced against the closest steady surface to keep them from falling to the floor.

'You're so good,' L managed between alternately coaxing Light's mouth open and having his neck ravished with sharp nips and bites.

'I get to have you-' Light broke off in a gasp. 'To have you for my own. No more deals, oh God, no more 'just for tonight'. You are _mine_ ,' he whispered, not commanding, but raw with emotion.

This wasn't going to end like their 'just for tonight'. It couldn't. This deal meant that they could run away together, into their own universe, governed by their own laws.

'No more 'just for tonight'.' L echoed. 'Yes. Yes, definitely.'

Maybe it was the feeling of weightlessness that came from telling the truth in the Kira Case, maybe it was the surreality of this corridor tucked away, with a meeting they could still hear going on barely a dozen doors away. Maybe it was just the insanity of a suspect and a detective becoming more than. Maybe it was just the quietness of breathing and steady kisses with words murmured underneath, but the sweet nothings Light kept repeating started to take on real weight and words and meaning; he was saying ' _I love you_ ', that beautiful forbidden promise.

'I love you,' Light said again, unsteadily, then with more confidence. 'I love you, L,' _and I don't care whether you say it back_. L said it back, he was repeating it back to him, over and over, breathlessly, shakily, like he couldn't believe he was saying the words.

Kisses and their new deal and soft laughter, all woven together by names and three words in repetition that never wore out.

 _You are not Kira_ , L promised. _You have two sides, one is Light, one is Kira, and they are different, and I've fallen in love with one. I can do that, right? I can love you and hate your other side, can't I, and not feel like crying when I think about what our endgame will be?_

Too much time was passing. Their absence was obvious now; people were going to start becoming suspicious-that is, if they hadn't already heard them, or poked their heads out of the conference room and chanced a look left to see their head detective and major suspect kissing and moaning and whispering frantic _I love you_ 's.

'How much do you care about me?'

A long silence. L imagined the echo of what would have been Kira's answer, ' _Where is this coming from? You know I care_ …'

It was sudden and out of place, and L knew that. He hadn't meant to say it. It had just happened, like cloudbursts in August or making decisions that led to late confessions or finding yourself thinking of someone too much.

Light could say many things, ' _I don't know_ ', ' _enough_ ', ' _a lot_ '. Or he could parrot, word for word, what L had heard the last time he had asked.

'Enough to know that L as...you, and L the detective, are different.'

It was a Light answer, full of references that L couldn't understand, that probably only made sense inside Light's head. The Kira suspect never answered any direct questions, but he seemed to hear all the other pleas, and his words soothed those. It was not the answer from last time, it was different, and it was enough.

He was enough, this childish, beautiful young man, they, together, were enough.

A soft, choked noise, barely audible, L's hands whitening at the knuckles. Those was the only indications the raven-haired man gave that he was crying.

'It's okay. It's okay,' Light soothed, holding L closer and letting his fragile body shudder against his chest.

'I-I don't know why I'm crying…' L whispered.

0o0o0o

He did know why he was crying.

L had asked Beyond the same question once, 'How much do you care about me?' And Beyond had looked him in the eyes without flicking up to the supposed numbers above his head and smiled a shark's smile.

'Enough that I always come back, don't I?'

L had laughed then, because it was the only thing to do. You had to play all of Beyond's games and solve all of his little diversions, or else. You couldn't take Beyond or anything else seriously, you couldn't talk for too long about things you loved, or people would pry apart the cracks that showed when you did and rip you apart.

Just because L was Beyond's lover didn't mean he was safe from his power plays. In fact, he was most vulnerable.

Beyond, Beyond, Beyond, his old protege who had always stood unbalanced on his razor blades, between the rational face he showed to others and the absolute animal he became when alone. Alone, or with L. Beyond didn't seem to register the difference.

L had lost count of how many times he'd had come out of the bedroom with bites and bruises from their 'playing'. And for someone who kept meticulous track of anybody he'd loved or gotten invested in as a suspect-or both, in two cases-it must have been too many times.

He could still remember that low, smoky voice, once smooth and amused, then roughened by fire, but still cold and deep and carrying on at least three separate conversations somewhere far away from you.

' _It's been too_ long.' Their running joke every night they managed together, whispered against skin before falling into the bed with their clothes on the floor. Maybe it was too long without a good partner, one you could look at for a fraction of a second and share a million things.

The worst were the nights when Beyond had taken the name Rue and had run away to create a case L would refuse to solve. L remembered the act that had incurred that, but only as something like a dream. If he accepted it was a memory, then he'd have to face all the consequences and burn scars lacing Beyond's throat and back.

0o0o0o

'It's okay,' Light said again. All he could do was try to hold down the insistently rising panic. Seeing L cry was like seeing your parents cry when you were young. Terrifying. Surreal. Wrong. You had gone from being the one who could crawl under their covers when you had a nightmare to the one holding their shuddering shoulders as they screamed for it all to be over.

It was not something a child should have to do. Yet it happened.

It shouldn't have been so hard for the seventeen-year-old man to see his boyfriend crying. For anybody else, it would have simply been a moment to hold them close until they could pull back together again.

But L didn't cry. He wasn't supposed to. He was supposed to be invulnerable and indifferent and look up after a fight with dispassionate eyes.

'It's okay,' Light said, and held L closer, wishing he didn't have to be the adult, and L didn't either.

L shaking and gone, Light dreaming of different worlds where everybody functioned like it was still childhood, agreements to stop saying 'just one night'.

 _I am Light and you are L and we are not detectives or suspects, we have gone back into our own universe_.

It was not the Kira Case there, thank God.

0o0o0o

Nothing lasts forever. They had to return to the real world, wracked with guilt that they'd allowed so many moments of weakness. They'd felt good, though.

'Was that what would have happened if we were normal?' L asked.

'Yes. Did you like it?' Light smiled and leaned down for a kiss, reminding himself it was allowed.

'I think we need more practice.' L accepted, humming happily.

'In another universe, we did.' L's pleased purring cut off, and the gentle embrace hardened. 'Sorry.'

'It's true, though.'

L didn't look much different with supposedly blotchy eyes from crying. The sleepless shadows covered them up. Hopefully it was just because of that, and not the chance that L had been crying as well as not sleeping.

As expected, their absence was not overlooked. Mogi gave Light a suspicious look when they'd sat down, and L's fingers twisted secretly in his wasn't helping Light's casual expression.

The ink pressed against skin, and L turned his hand over to complete their last note, the one they would let fade instead of cutting the threads of.

Maybe the Kira Case was awful and dangerous and double-bladed with more than two sides. Maybe agreeing to anything that had led them here was a mistake. Maybe trying to build their own sanctuary in the middle of a hurricane would hurt more in the end.

But maybe they could catch a moment between gales and rebuild, smiling at each other and the words on their palms.

They didn't deserve to try to be safe. Nobody truly does. But they would take it, take anything, take each other as a pause from the chaos. It was enough.

I have this feeling, L wrote with his finger on Light's back, hoping the wide strokes would reduce any trace of his meaning to aimless scribbles, that my life is going to end by your hands, and soon.

 _And I'm sorry that it has to be this way, that we couldn't have had more time._

 _And that I'm writing this. It seems like a betrayal._

 _I'm sorry for everything, Light-kun, and I wish so badly that everything was different and our rules carried into the real world_.

If Light had realized what L was drawing out, he didn't give any indications, and they fell back into their old rhythm full of breathing and not, Light's hands gripping tight but not deep enough to hurt, the look in his eyes both possessive and giving as he whispered, 'I swear, I'm going to best you one day…'

'As I'm trying to you,' L responded, and they laughed. This was their ritual, rolling over in bed closer and closer, still not finding to what depths their puzzle pieces could connect.

The car chase was fast and heady and filled with screeching tires and barked, staticky commands. The sports car careened through traffic, pursued by the police. Light could practically smell Higuchi's gritted-teeth desperation.

They watched it all indifferently from above, a circling bird of prey to dive and pick off weakened animals-and deliver a quick stab to the lions that had stalked it. The chopper was silent save for the steady thrumming of the blades, which had long ago faded into background noise.

 _We've cornered you, Kira,_ Light thought in satisfaction. _And after we clean up all the loose ends, then maybe this case can finally be closed and I can go back to something like a normal life._ A glance of skin on skin, and a shiver went down Light's spine. _Something, possibly, with him._

A life together, after he'd convinced L to retire from being a detective and he'd finished school. Somewhere quiet where they could build a foundation for their relationship on something less volatile than the Kira Case.

Maybe they'd even make everything official, get married, and raise a family…

0o0o0o

The next few minutes passed like a movie. Or maybe it was hours. It didn't really matter, because in the end, they got to the same point: L holding the Death Note and Light reaching for it, and his fingers connecting with the black cover and suddenly everything went dark and bright and truthful and awful.

A television, panting as he'd written a fake name. Rivals, true rivals. Something with black feathers that had perched like a raven; Ryuk. Misa. Rem.

Plans all falling into place like puzzle pieces and dominoes, perfectly every time, except for when they didn't.

Cameras.

Writing, hands flying over paper, ink smudged. He'd taken pride, no, pleasure in delivering justice. Knowing he was a killer, and then that feeling slowly being smothered by the endorphins trained to release forty seconds after the last stroke of his hand.

That awful biting obsession to run back home and let the pen and paper dance their deadly routine.

He had become addicted to death, and it was the best drug he could ever have.

Names, sheets and sheets of them, lined up in rows like inmates for the noose.

A thousand lives, penned down, each stroke of the pen severing red strings of fate.

He'd killed them all. I am justice, he'd cried.

The power of a god.

L, L, L, the rival of Kira and lover of Light.

Who am I?

He'd pleaded with the universe to answer for eternities, so long he'd forgotten the real question he was asking. Everything had faded into static. So when the universe finally answered, it was sharp and bitter and taunting.

The world, the life he'd imagined? Nothing but that: a fruitless hope.

I am Kira.

 **0o0o0o**

 **Imagine yourself differently. Imagine yourself as your own perfect image. Would you be happy, if you had brought the change upon yourself with memories of your old life?**

 **Or, if you'd been born that way. Would you hate it, and want to be someone else?**

 _ **:: Snow falling from the sky and when you look up at it and feel tiny and dizzy and insignificant**_

 **-LyingMonsters, the one who laughs at things nobody else would and thinks until the world drops away**


	12. Chapter 12

**Twelve is my favourite number.**

 **0o0o0o**

The god had been sleeping. Drugged, more like, by his own hands. It had to be, so the plan could carry out, his body going through the preassigned motions.

It should have gone perfectly, and ended with a heart stiller and quieter than it wanted.

It would have gone perfectly, if Light hadn't come back.

It would have ended with a god standing on the ashes of his dead rival, if Light hadn't fallen in love with his detective.

The god expected to wake up with his plan moving along it's smoothly oiled gears. Instead, he woke up to a twisted relationship, all blurry boundaries and thorns and broken glass, dancing on razors and stolen nights.

He woke up to a Light who traced fingers along faded blue-ink words in palms and tapped out patterns, _tap scratch tap tap_.

He woke up to a Light who'd forgotten too much; a Light who thought about L like he was an angel.

The god woke up to a Light who was broken and useless to the cause, all ashes consumed too many times by fire.

The god woke up and decided to kill Light.

0o0o0o

If you had asked, L would have denied it. He would have said he never saw the moment when the war started and his Light's eyes went tortured and dark. He would have said that Light's flashes of a different personality, one who carried himself like he owned the ground beneath his feet, was simply a product of stress, or anger, or anything other than the confirmation that Light Yagami was Kira. He would have taken the blame on himself and become convinced he'd pushed Light too far, just like A, just like Beyond.

If you'd dragged it out of him, the detective would have pretended he told you everything; that he'd seen what happened, but thought Light could win and take back his mind.

If he'd allowed himself to tell the truth, he would have said that he saw Light's death, saw Kira wake up and kill his angel, and thought of the blue ink they hadn't erased and wondered if Kira would wash it away.

But he didn't. L didn't admit that he saw Light slip away, because if he did, there was no reason to keep going or try to bring Light back.

0o0o0o

The memories lasted less than a fraction of a second. The memories lasted a million years. The memories lasted seven minutes.

It's said that at the moment of death, the brain rewinds the extent of it's memories in a process that appears to take about seven minutes. Some people whisper that at the end, when the memories have backed up to the point of death, the reel loops back on itself and goes through a memory of memories, then over and over again, warping time until a second is stretched forever.

It took seven minutes to rewind light-years of conflicted thought and emotion, of college tests, some unorthodox, of writing names, of a mocking, disembodied voice. Of fake names. It took seven minutes for Light to remember who he was when he died, and it was a cruel sort of irony that the time when all the scattered pieces of his head reassembled was the time when Light Yagami split irrevocably in two.

Kira rose out of the twisted depths of Light's mind like a parasite bent on destroying it's host-no, not destroying. Taking over, reducing it's carrier to little more than flesh to conduct thoughts and carry them out.

Light died the moment Kira returned, but it would take seven rewound minutes until all traces of him were truly gone, and that's what hurt L the most. It would have been better if Light had just been erased like he'd never existed. You can't miss and long for and cry for and taunt a thousand ways something you've never had.

If Light had disappeared from all but L's memory, he could have pretended it was all a dream. Or maybe a nightmare. After years and years of denial, maybe he could have looked in the mirror and wouldn't have seen sometimes-red-sometimes-brown eyes staring back from just behind and above his shoulder.

Light came back in flashes and bits and erratic shards, all tortured and broken and sad, and he was never going to be fixed. Hadn't L once wished to find all of Light's broken pieces and gild the edges, to let the scars fade?

L had wanted nothing more than to heal Light from the Kira Case. It would be a long process, and L might have to cauterize the wounds shut again, but he was willing to wait. Or, at least, that's what he told himself while he'd tested the boundaries too soon and too often to see if he could break them. He could, he did.

What a cruel teacher irony was.

0o0o0o

They used to wake up to hair being brushed out of eyes and soft things like laughter and kisses. They used to whisper at night until it wasn't and the sun glowed through the window. They used to repeat things that, through some quirk of the universe, never wore down. The edges stayed sharp, but they were past cutting each other where it was especially ragged.

L had woken up with Light in his arms once, and it had felt right. Everything was perfect in that moment. Everything was normal, and it ached in his chest like poison. Some of the pain must have come from the fact that it was once, just once. The other nights, Light may as well have been six feet under.

L had thought that normalcy was baffling. What did you do? Everything was a repeated routine.

But if his ritual was waking up to his Light's lips on his and breathing matched with his, then he could understand. He could live an entire life in the seconds when they weren't awake or asleep, and some memory the Kira Case demanded to be forgotten swam back up and let them play a different game. He could learn more about the ticking, volatile bombs that lay buried inside all human's hearts in a minute with his head on Light's chest than he had in years as L the detective.

So what if this, whatever it was, was nothing more than them turning a blind eye to the chaos outside their illusion utopia, holding back the tides for a perfect snapshot before releasing the sea and drowning in the lashback?

L knew when he would die. He knew Light would kill him. So he could have a few moments and make his death all the worse, couldn't he?

It had been one night of pure connection. Light had ripped old scars open and remade him, frozen water and red-hot flames in tests that threatened to shatter him. He would have let Light break him, let him push his head under the water and laugh as his flame guttered out.

Light had sent him through hell and raised him back to heaven. His angel had left brands all over his hands and soul, and L would wear the marks like they were jewelry.

Just one night; of the words _'I love you_ '.

Just one night; because Kira had burned Light to ashes and presented the charred remains to L all tied up in a bow.

Mockery, that's what it was. Kira was an imitation of Light like Beyond had pretended he was L. Two sides of the same coin who could only imagine what it was like on their twin's face.

It hurt to see Kira's smile and hear him whisper in L's ear before they fell asleep. It was wrong to see the flat glare of red, red, red eyes. Light was supposed to be there, but he was dead in seven warped minutes.

They could pretend that Light wasn't dead for everybody else, but alone, Kira dropped his puppet of Light's body and came back, his laugh the soundtrack to L pulling the blankets around himself and crying instead of screaming.

The tic-tac-toe games had started again, while the tap scratch tap tap L had grown to love was gone.

The ink was nearly faded on L's palm, barely the memory of things that question and matter and escape.

He didn't ask Kira if the note he'd written for Light was still there.

0o0o0o

The phone had barely completed one ring before Watari picked up. If L was calling on this line, it was urgent.

'Watari, I am going to die.'

Normally, those words would have terrorized the older detective. But now?

'How long did it take for you to accept that fact, Ryuzaki?' Watari asked gently. L laughed.

'Too long. I blame Light,' he said, remembering to keep his voice down and not alert Kira.

'Not to be insensitive, but should I set the final preparations in order?' The older man opened his computer and started clicking, already prepared for L's answer.

'I wouldn't want anything less. Oh, and Watari?'

'Yes?'

'Thank you.'

0o0o0o

They were always running off. There was something about being in a hallway that had a 0.5% chance of pedestrian traffic than one that had a 1% chance. No matter what, they'd inflate that tiny percent and forget about the grand scale.

Kira had traced a finger along his neck and whispered, ' _Tell me about the one before me_.'

Light wouldn't have done that. Light had given him rules and chains to forget Beyond, if only in an offering of skin and heat. It was enough.

'You wanted to know about the other one? The only other person I've ever cared about, the one who I let die because I was too stubborn to play his little game?'

Kira stared back, and L tried so hard to convince himself that it was Light's predatory gleam in those red eyes.

'His name was Beyond Birthday.'

Kira makes no sign of recognition at the name, and L berates himself for expecting one.

'He told me once that he saw numbers above everyone's heads. Said it came from the fact that his eyes were different. Shinigami eyes, he called them.'

'What did the numbers mean?' Kira asked, mouth quirking upwards.

'They showed when the person would die. And before you ask-I don't know mine. I told him never to tell me.'

That was a lie. L had asked once, and Beyond had all too readily supplied the information with a chuckle and calculatedly careless touch. A sultry whisper in his ear, like the date of his death was intimate, on par with ' _I love you_.'

' _Five-one-one-six-one-one-two-one_.'

The numbers were running down. He had hours instead of days instead of years.

He'd expected to die suddenly, maybe sitting at his computer, halfway through a sentence. Maybe Kira would control his last actions; write a message of the god's victory on the floor in his own blood?

No, Kira didn't rejoice in his victories. He reveled in his enemy's defeats. It'd be a scrawled note of L's failure to catch the killer and solve the case.

The perfect ending for the perfect rival.

Light's casual touch brought him back. L stared at those slightly tanned fingers resting on his arm and felt sick. Light wouldn't have done that. Light treated every moment of contact like it was precious and touched him like he was going to break, or he was some volatile creature who burned and scalded and would rather be lit aflame than be touched by human hands.

'I'm not volatile. I won't break,' L muttered.

'Sorry?'

'Thinking out loud,' L said.

Kira stared and the hint of a smile emerged. 'Thinking about how you aren't a volatile, breakable human creature?' That hand on his arm was holding him tight enough to bruise-when had that happened?-and his eyes were pure red, pure Kira. 'When we both know you are?'

L had played this game before, but not with Light. Light loved the dominance-submission L could give, but it was only a show. They never would have hurt each other. Nothing they couldn't heal.

(Beyond would stab you and twist the knife. Kira would stab you and pretend to cry when the paramedics pronounced you dead. Light would stab you and blame someone else for the wound that was never deep enough to kill.)

Kira was different. Beyond had been different. They hurt not out of pleasure, but to create it for themselves. Always at other people's expenses.

When Kira laughed, the noise was the opposite of white noise.

Loving Beyond Birthday was like kissing the blade of a poison-soaked knife, or dancing with a handshake murderer.

That was why he could be in a relationship with Light. After waking up too many times to a cold bed and a numbly twisted heart, to keep running back to someone who used him and called him 'my favourite toy', to think about Beyond for days on end when the latter would barely give him a thought, to give Beyond everything he was and only get hurt for it, Light was a relief.

Light was firewood and the arrogance and childhood that kept him burning and everything fast and sharp and hot. Light was going to kill him. Light was nothing and everything compared to Beyond Birthday.

0o0o0o

If Light was a wildfire, all beautiful death but only if you stood too close, Beyond was an earthquake, one that came out of nowhere and destroyed without mercy or inhibition or true aim and held the threat of another until you ran away.

 _If we're all natural disasters_ , L thought, _then what am I?_

A hurricane, maybe, with his destructive tendencies that were never really directed. Or a fire devil; yes, the irony there would be delicious.

Maybe L was a drought, and killed not with what was there but with what should have been but wasn't.

 **0o0o0o**

 **Natural disasters, or accidental beauty?**

 _ **:: That song that you can't forget, ever, and sometimes it's too short and sometimes too long**_

 **-LyingMonsters, the one who forgets things and can't force themselves to care**


	13. Chapter 13

**Always that question.**

 **0o0o0o**

A thousand preemptive answers tumbled through L's mind, and all of them fell into bitter ashes on his tongue.

 _What are we, really? That was always the question our rules couldn't answer_.

'We're L and Light,' the detective offered acridly, before admitting that might not be true anymore. The moment when 'Light' became 'Kira' and the moment he'd started personally switching the former out for the latter were vastly different.

 _I told you I had overdosed, on nights without sleep and too much sugar. All to explain the way I burned up around you, when your mere presence was the drug I'm addicted to_.

Who are they, who have they become since they set each other on fire and treated the burns themselves?

A detective and a suspect. Two people who never should have had the chance to fall, let alone matter so much to each other.

Is it a last fling, or true love? Or just a drug that they injected through their veins so they could close their eyes at night, a knife set on the stove and used to trace old scars and ink on the skin?

Or was it love; somehow, between two people with no chances and no options left?

L wanted to say all of that, all of the begging, wanting, hoping words that hovered between the spaces of his thoughts.

But you can't do that. You can't explain that what you had was never love, though you tried to make it feel that way. It was intoxication, it was cold and heavy addiction, it was puppet threads pulling you together underneath the water instead of following the red strings under your own free will.

Maybe he could have offered up those stuttering words to Light with a prayer that he'd understand it, but not to Kira. To Kira, all he could say was 'I love you' and hope Light was still listening.

0o0o0o

'I love you…'

The god could feel Light struggling, begging to be let free, to answer that he'd always felt the same way. Oh, that love and longing and pain at the silence was all the better to crush, push him down, snap another few holding lines in the web.

Instead, the god hummed and smiled like L's answer was amusing, cute, infantile.

L pretended he didn't care, or he didn't see, or that the careless reaction was normal. But the god saw the hurt in his eyes and the way he pulled back like he'd been burned.

The god saw all of that and loved it, loved it and the way Light fell a little bit further into his own hell.

 _I'm going to take everything from you both_ , the god promised.

0o0o0o

L wrapped the raw confusion and pain in a thousand strings and buried it deep. Emotions had no place in L the detective's analytical skills. They were fragile things that never held up to the test of life, right?

What L had analyzed: When Light had touched the Death Note, he had changed back to Kira somehow.

What L suspected: Kira had returned and intended to kill him.

What L hoped with a desperate sort of prayer: Light, his Light, was still somewhere and retrievable.

What L knew, after years when he hadn't needed to lie to himself: Light was gone-as good as dead, but not quite there yet.

Hurting and unreachable.

Lying monsters do nothing but hurt, but in that moment, L wished his mind wouldn't tell the truth. He would have rather had it covered up, to slowly peel the bandage off the wound later, see what happened. It would be slow and painful-more painful that this quick stab-but this stab was through his heart.

Lies sometimes kept people safe, but in the end, truth prevailed. L never wanted to see the truth again.

0o0o0o

'Are you okay? You look worried, Ryuzaki.'

A cool hand touched the lines that had started to appear at the corners of his eyes, and he flinched back. He remembered when Beyond had done that, wiped away the tears in a pause between biting at his neck and given a smile like, ' _Did I really do this? Did I really make the great detective L cry?_ '

The same smile Kira wore. He must be crying again.

'You know…' Kira leaned closer, his breath tickling L's neck, 'I wondered. From the moment we met, I tried to imagine what it was like to be you.'

The tone of his voice was purring seductiveness now. What was it about people connecting pain with pleasure on such a primal level?

'I never imagined that I'd find out. You, Ryuzaki, always think you've won, always think you're a cut above everybody else, always think you are some god removed from this world who deals out justice with the flick of a hand.'

'You are a child, Ryuzaki, a child who's guardian angel is gone, a child who never fit in to the extent that all they could ever be was a brilliant mind behind a letter.'

Kira remembered, every confession that had spilled from L's lips to Light, and he carved them into torture tools hewed from something more intimate than bone.

Kira knew how to hurt him in the way Light never would have.

With words, words, words; words and his famous lies that weren't quite lies anymore.

'You are a child, _L_ , and you never grew up.'

Last time he'd heard his name in that honey-sweet voice, it'd been a plea for _more, harder, please, L_. Light had used it like a prayer, Kira, as a weapon.

And it hurt. So much worse than he ever would have admitted. So much worse than he had ever been prepared to feel at Light's hands.

'You are a child dependent on me; _addicted_ to me. Without the promise that I'd break our deal another time, you'll be left hanging forever.' Kira laughed and pushed his chin up for a kiss. 'A junkie without another hit, that's what you are.'

Maybe it was the way Kira knew that this would cut deeper than any physical wound ever could. Maybe it was the fears he'd held onto for forever and a day given voice, and Light's voice at that. Maybe it was just that kiss, too hard around the edges and without a hint of Light's warmth.

Kira had kissed him wrong.

'What are you, then?' Too loud. His voice was too loud, and it cracked and broke like he was crying. Maybe he was.

Kira tilted his head. 'I don't know. Why don't you tell me?' Line delivered, challenge set, smile just in case he'd switched the glasses right.

He shouldn't tell. He shouldn't take the bait, because Kira's offerings were always burned with poison.

He'd always return, try to best him; he'd always act back. Answer back, turn back, run, desperate and ruined, back to his drug.

'You are childish,' L whispered. 'You have problems with accepting that you could never have been anything more than a good student without the power that was never yours.'

'You need to think you're a god so you never see that you're just as human as the people you killed. You need to think that you were chosen, that you are special, that you were the only one who could bring justice upon the world, or you fall apart.'

L was screaming at himself to stop, to tell Light that he didn't mean it, that he didn't know where any of it had come from.

 _You know where it came from. You've always been thinking this. You just didn't want to believe you could_.

'You are nothing but a human, Light Yagami, a human who borrowed power as a ticket to a game he never should have played.'

 _Stop. Stop, stop, stop!_

 _Why are you doing this?_

'If I'm addicted to you, then you're addicted to your own deluded world you've built inside your head. You are childish because you're still playing a game you should have given up a long time ago.'

 _Why_ , L wondered, as he broke the only good thing he'd had for so long, _why do human beings find so much pleasure in corrupting beautiful things, in their own destruction?_

0o0o0o

Did L really think that?

That he didn't know he was nothing but a human with a notebook, with a shinigami's death sentence hanging over his head every day?

That he didn't know he was nothing but a dice roll in the gods's game, that he'd proved there were a thousand other people who would have done the same thing, given the Death Note?

That he hadn't played this borrowed-power game of lies and words and fire and love and hate for _him_ , for him and his vulnerability and another chance?

That he didn't know he was Kira, and that he wished he was dead instead?

 _See_ , Kira whispered. _Some people barely need more than an invitation to turn into ugly human monsters_.

 _I see, Kira_.

 _I know_.

 _I just hoped that it'd be different. That L would be different_.

 _I guess I was wrong_.

0o0o0o

Kira looked deranged. He looked like Beyond. He had brown eyes.

'He' was not Kira at this moment. He was Light, the Light L wanted to run to and hold and kiss and apologize for everything he'd said.

'He' was Light, and his eyes were blank and bitter and destroyed.

L had ruined everything.

'Interesting…'

'Is now the time to also say that I used you? That I never loved you? That you are nothing to me, _Ryuzaki?_ '

L forgot how to cry in that moment. He forgot a million things, like what it had felt like to burn and dance and fall.

Light was telling the truth now, and how easily he'd swallowed all his lies of 'I love you' before now made him sick.

How many times had he repeated it back?

'I guess it's over now. Now that we don't have the chain. You have no excuse to come running back.'

L was breaking, broken, and all of Light's spun-glass lies shattered and stuck in his skin when he walked.

'Go!' Light screamed. 'Leave!'

 _Light_ …

Light aged decades in a second as he stared at the man he had once loved.

'Just go.'

L did.

0o0o0o

Light held until L had completely disappeared from the room.

There was a crack in the shell he'd used since forever, and water was seeping through and freezing, spreading the fracture wider.

 _Hairline cracks, like spiderweb lines, like ink; they're all connected_.

Humans are made of mirrors, mirrors that, if they reflect something enough, start to take a permanent shadow of where it always stood.

Humans are made of mirrors, and their delicate balance with every other paled reflection can be shattered with a word, a glance, a night.

Humans are made of mirrors, and no reflection can ignore the crushed glass all over your heart.

This had been their bed, Light thought dully, and he'd woken up that one time with L's peaceful breathing.

Did it still smell like him? It'd only been a few hours since they were here together.

It did.

Oh God, it did, like rain and smoke and burnt sugar. It smelled like nights and sharp edges. It was him, all of this was what he had been, what they had been, and he was standing in the wreckage with the shattered pieces at his feet.

Endorphins from the words on his palm fading when salt water fell on them.

It was only fitting for someone like him to end alone like this.

0o0o0o

L had thought wandering was random. How did that explain the way he kept ending up back in the places they had haunted, the solitary confinement cell, the hallway it'd become more than single nights?

How did he explain how he finally fell asleep huddled in the pillows of what used to be Light's bed, losing track of for how long he cried?

How long he had screamed at himself to wind back his clock, to swallow back words even if they cut his throat going down?

To stop breaking beautiful, precious things?

To stop cutting all the strings that held him together?

To just stop reaching out for fire that looked beautiful, because it hurt. Why couldn't he remember that it'd always burn him?

0o0o0o

 _L_ …

 _L, I am Kira_.

 _I thought you should know, before both of us are dead_.

0o0o0o

 _Angel, Light_...

 _What have I done?_

0o0o0o

The god looked at his handiwork and was impressed. Not even he had predicted how far the cracks would spread.

It was the most interesting thing, how deeply these two could hurt each other.

Even more interesting was how each of his pawns broke. Light usually held it inside himself, inside a steel shell, before he released it all in a screaming fit, crying and holding desperately onto every memory of happier times. He took everything and used it as fuel, then guttered out.

He fought when it was convenient for him, and then he gave up.

L was quieter. He kept his poison under his skin, and it bled into his bloodstream, killing him softly.

He refused to cut it out, to let go. He'd rather suffer.

Blood and bruises, there two were. L would make you hurt forever, but you'd have to find another way to die. Light was a bloody explosion of crimson and the shell ripping into your stomach before it was all over.

They were drinking the other's poisons right now, weren't they? L, who had resigned himself to quiet, gnawing pain, had to deal with stretched seconds of white-hot agony that he had no defenses against. And Light, who had hardened to milliseconds of supernovas inside his skull, had to force himself into lie awake throughout the night, simply aching and unable to taste the sweetness of ever ending the pain.

The red strings between them were frayed with a poisoned knife, and it was seeping along the cords to their hearts.

Kira watched his masterpieces, his two broken mirrors, and laughed at the world.

 _You never should have been together. You are an angel and a demon. You are human mistakes. You are firewood, burning each other to ashes, and yet you are barely matches in my game_.

 **0o0o0o**

 **It wasn't supposed to end like this, not really.**

 **I thought they would have had a different ending in mind.**

 **But this _is_ what would have happened, with Kira, with them.**

 _ **:: Hearing laughter that isn't yours, and you love the way it sounds like it could have been**_

 **-LyingMonsters, the one who simply lets the workings decide how they move**


	14. Chapter 14

**'Just for tonight?'**

 **0o0o0o**

' _Take me, use me, burn me_ ,' Light pleaded, and the blue shackles around his wrist clattered against themselves.

L knelt beside him and wished for a different ending. One where Light was happy, even if he wasn't.

'I love you,' L found himself saying, over and over, and the words were branding themselves into Light's skin.

Light smiled and laughed, and L saw the word 'LIAR' burnt onto his tongue.

'BORROWED POWER' on his arms.

'CHILDISH GAMES' on his back.

'WORD GAMES' on his collarbones.

Simply 'GAMES' on his chest.

Underneath of each of L's accusations, there were the words he'd written, things he'd loved, twisted and broken, but still recognizable.

And when Light opened his eyes again, they were dead and unseeing, with 'KIRA' seared into the irises.

They were brown.

With shaking hands, L reached for a compliant Light's palm and looked at their note, their final promise.

'KIRA CASE'.

Light pulled L closer and kissed him. His lips tasted like blood, with no trace of Light left.

' _L, I lo-_ '

L woke up to the taste of salt and the bitterness that comes when you sleep too long. He woke up to his own breathing, which was too loud and too quiet and far too alone. He woke up cold all over, and the blue-ink words were barely there anymore.

If he was with Light, had woken up beside him, the brunette with beautiful eyes would have kissed him as he retraced the words.

What was his-what was Light doing, L wondered. What was he thinking, how had he passed the night alone?

Had he sat curled in the blankets, fingers tapping as he straightened the sheets? Had he stared at the ceiling for hours before he'd thrown the pillows at the walls and laid back down sore but satisfied in the way a small child does when it defies it's parents?

Had he slept with his face buried in the pillows, just in case Death should stop by? Had he hurt until four AM, writhing in the sheets, hallucinating every time he closed his eyes, unsure if he'd dreamed stumbling to the bathroom and scrubbing every trace of blue ink from his body?

0o0o0o

L stared at himself in the mirror and tried to see the reflection as his, to see this crumpled paper doll as his. Tried to see whatever it was that held so much breakage, so many burn scars, so much potential for hurting anything and everything he loved.

He stared until his reflection was just as alien as he felt. He stared until he saw Beyond, messily flattened hair and unfocused eyes, a lie already poised on his lips, and jerked back, falling away from the deranged genius before he realized it has just been him.

Him, all along, all alone.

'If he'd been with Light' were the gateway words, and they kept coming back, bringing poisoned offerings and fake smiles, telling him everything that could have been different, if only he hadn't ruined it. If only, if only.

What if he'd done everything different, starting with that first night? What if he'd ignored Light, ignored the falling angel? What if he hadn't turned, hadn't ran and caught it, hadn't used pain and pleasure as a diversion from his true means: simply wanting to keep the angelic being from becoming like him?

What if, what if the Kira Case didn't exist.

0o0o0o

Tears and hands on mirrors, choked sobs, his crumpled paper doll of a body.

Everything, everything that could have been. He could have been leaning against Light's shoulder, drifting asleep, catching barely the remnants of Light's whispered 'I love you' and the kiss on his forehead. He could have stood in the middle of their room, hands tangled with Light's, kissing away his angel's tears in the minutes before his own death.

Everything, everything burned to nothing.

0o0o0o

The god watched Light tangled up, waking up, looking up at heaven as his wings were stripped.

Light had been successfully reminded of what his purpose was. It had been hard, though. L had been woven so deeply into his being that cutting the poison out had reforged him.

It had been worth it, though, the god mused. He hadn't predicted this-not even he knew circumstance that well-but look! Look at Light, his perfect vessel, purged clean once again.

The god was never meant to be the one to kill L. That was Light's role to fill.

It was always so much better when they had to come up with their own plans and watch them come to poisonous fruition.

The god let himself fall asleep. The next time he woke up, L and Light both would be dead.

The last thing the god remembered was Light choking back words and sobs as he scrubbed the blue ink from his palm, so hard the skin reddened.

0o0o0o

The meeting was hard. Speaking normally was, surprisingly, the easiest task. L had learned never to let emotions out during a case, and that included speech. Breaking down was not an option.

What was? In this dangerously calm aftermath of the storm, when all he knew how to do was fight against the gales of fate?

Ignore it; like he did everything he didn't know how to handle. Ignore the fire at his shoulder and the fresh wounds they both had.

 _God, Light, I wish I could make all the cuts I gave you better._

It would have been better if they didn't have to speak, L thought. But they'd made an image to the Task Force of 'more than friends', and they had to keep the mask up.

It hurt to rip off. It was so hard not to fall back in when Light's hand brushed his between keystrokes. The only thing that kept L from convincing himself that whatever they had been was still possible was the brittleness of Light's smile. If he tapped it, it'd crack, but L wouldn't.

0o0o0o

L stayed behind, claiming he had a few last possibilities to run through. Alone. Light held his gaze an extra second when he said that, but didn't challenge.

There had been a time when Light would have sat down beside him and fiddled with his watch and maybe accidentally grabbed L's hand under the table and ran his thumb over his palm.

Once.

L watched Light turn and leave and gave his angel his heart, told him to keep it, to rip it up and burn it like firewood.

He told Light 'goodbye' in the way he could, because the sight of him so betrayed juxtaposed against someone else's normality was too much.

L sat in the middle of the room where he'd challenged Kira, where he'd ran a thousand tests for his rival and found himself crying.

He didn't move for a long time. When he did, it was to find Light.

0o0o0o

'Back again?' were the first words Light said. It was Light, too, pained brown eyes and all. 'Back like I said, back like you'll always be?'

'Back,' L said. 'You were right.'

'No,' Light said quietly. 'No!' Louder. 'I was wrong about everything. I was wrong about you, Ryuzaki. In a perfect world, none of this ever would have happened.'

'This isn't a perfect world, Light-kun.'

'It could have been.'

They stared at each other across what used to be their bed, where it had all started with a choice and the words 'just for tonight'.

Light kept glancing at his hands. He was the one who broke first, too, running across the room and nearly grabbing L before he pulled back, keeping them inches apart. Those few inches hurt.

'Ryuzaki…' Light growled.

'It's L,' L reminded him, aching at the way he couldn't close the space between them.

'L,' Light said, testing the name again. 'God, I don't even know how I thought we could have something so fragile.'

L reached out and skimmed his fingers over the back of Light's hand. Light shivered and flinched and pulled away all in the same heartbeat, but his eyes stayed fixed on L's long enough for the raven to read what he wanted.

It was unearthly, how much hurting and hate could be held in just one look. His Light was gone, but this thing wasn't quite Kira, either.

'You can't build something on addiction,' L said.

'Even if it's mutual.' Light moved closer; maybe it was just L's imagination. 'Even if both want it to hold desperately.'

''The road to hell is paved with good intentions,'' L quoted.

'Maybe.' Light was definitely closer this time.

'And maybe…' L whispered, to those awful broken brown eyes; a promise. 'Maybe you're my drug, and maybe you're the medicine that heals it. Maybe you're both, Light-kun. All I know is that if I don't get more, I'll die.'

Let me die, Light, because escape was never an option with you. From the moment I said 'just for tonight', I've been caught in your web, and your strings are still tangled around me.

Light stepped closer and tipped L's head up with a gentle touch and kissed him.

He kissed wrong, not like Kira, but not like his Light.

It was close enough, close enough that L could pretend.

'There,' he said, before L could even start to kiss him back.

'Will that do, just for tonight?'

'It's enough,' L said.

'If I was what could keep you alive, L…' Light stared at him for a long second, like he was everything and then nothing, like he would have come back if he wasn't burnt to ashes.

'You wouldn't,' L finished. 'You would have, once?'

'Maybe I wouldn't have, even then,' Light murmured, so quiet L had almost convinced himself he'd imagined it when Light dropped his hands from L's hips and stepped back.

 _Wait, not yet._

Maybe he'd said the words aloud, maybe he'd whispered them too soft before Light was pressed against him again, L's hands hesitant everywhere.

'Not yet,' L said, and kissed his angel again, his Light, and wished for a different world without Kira.

It was barely a moment before Light's mouth started moving against his, those tanned hands resting on his back and drawing lines.

This was his Light.

Light, his Light who he'd hunted, chained, hurt, used.

Back for the seconds before his death, angry, broken. His Light would kill him and burn the ashes, and he would finally be released.

Back for what L had tried to ignore since they met.

It was always going to be like this, wasn't it?

Just as it'd always been?

' _Just for tonight?_ '

0o0o0o

The truth is hard and cold, but it has a pinprick of brightness somewhere in the unilluminated depths. This twisted version is warmer, but it has no light anywhere.

That's fine with L. Searching for that tiny, dancing dot in the abysses of the truth was too hard. The lie didn't have any light anywhere, but you could wrap yourself in it and bury your face so nobody saw you crying.

He would accept the knife that Light offered with every word, every glance, every moment he was near, and drive it straight through his heart. Use Light, like Light used him, because the only thing they knew how was to hurt and abuse each other.

Use him to cauterize the wound the truth had made, the ones he himself had until they didn't hurt anymore.

I will always go running back to the person who hurt me. Not so I'll be healed. Just for another chance at the pain.

Maybe Light was Kira right now. It didn't matter. Whichever brilliant mind lay behind those eyes, they still had Light's body.

L would cut the warm, intoxicating drug Light's had given him out of his veins and replace it with Kira's poison in a wine glass.

Burn it all out with the glow of power that Light wore like a crown. Lose himself in the fire. Forget.

Just for tonight.

It was the same, exactly the same as their first night. Hard and rough and awful and addictive.

From the moment they'd fallen into bed and their clothes ended up across the room. From the moment they hadn't needed the cracked window to know where every point of the other was. From the moment they'd started kissing as a distraction for nail marks down their back.

They'd never made it past 'just for tonight', had they?

0o0o0o

 _Angel, is it time to dance again?_

 _Take me, use me, make me bleed and bruise and break._

 _Make me forget, angel. Just like before. Just like we always do. Do you remember our routine?_

 _Purify me, purge me, through this holy fire of a sinful act._

 _What's that? Purifying me would kill me?_

 _Angel, why are you stopping?_

0o0o0o

L let himself burn again, and reveled in the pain and pleasure.

He fell into pure and unbridled hate and love and lust, and unraveled himself from the last of Light's red strings.

Every bite and scratch and moan from his rival's lips cut away one of the words and promises he'd made with Light and let him begin again with Kira, back to that first night.

And if that incinerated the whole of his heart so that he couldn't ever feel love for anyone else after him, then so be it. Anyone else would just be a replacement. What could have been with Light, what could have been happiness, but was just lies under sometimes-red, sometimes-brown eyes.

Beautiful brown eyes.

They'd never had anything more than pretty words and games and childish delusions. This was not stepping back, this was stripping away all their lies and realizing that 'just for tonight' was all they'd ever had and be.

 _We are nothing to each other, Light, Kira, the only one who I can trust to hurt me just right._

That heat, that mind-blowing tightness and the slick sound of skin on skin. Their familiar rhythm. He'd come back for this. For hair haloed on a pillow, for half-lidded eyes barely visible as anything but crescents of honey and caramel, for his voice and twisting body when he begged, for his taste, of his skin and sweat and kiss. For the rapture that seemed to take over his body when he finished and the sudden clenching that dragged L's orgasm out of him as well. He'd come back for what Beyond always came back for.

Light Yagami was a drug, a poison you drank for the taste.

0o0o0o

 _We kept mistaking addiction for love; do you remember, angel? Every time. And the next time the universe pushes us together, we'll do this dance again, and again, and again..._

They wouldn't say 'I love you' tonight, or ever again. Not out loud.

 _I hate you, I love you._

 _My pyromaniac_.

0o0o0o

Maybe, maybe it could have ended differently.

Maybe Light could have held him and told him that 'just for tonight' was broken and still have had blue ink on his palm.

Maybe they could have kept up their game a little bit longer.

(Their beautiful, awful game of lies. He'd grown to love it.)

Maybe L should have expected it. Maybe he shouldn't have fallen back in. Maybe he shouldn't have thought that last night was enough.

For a suspect and a detective who never should have made a deal. For two humans who were nothing more than pawns fated to break no matter how hard they tried to hold the pieces together.

0o0o0o

 _Forty, thirty-nine, thirty-eight…_

 _I never loved you_ , Light whispered. _I lied, and you believed me._

He had repeated those words until he could believe them. Light twisted his image of his rival one final time and slowly, carefully, revealed his hand, showing the redness, like he'd gotten just a little bit too close to touching fire. The blue ink, fresh, in his own handwriting; 'Just for tonight?'

The look in those dark eyes was all surprise and disbelief and sorrow, like he'd really thought he'd meant something to Light.

He shouldn't have been so surprised. They were angel and demon, after all. They weren't supposed to make deals.

0o0o0o

L looked at his angel, his Light, and searched for some hint that the man he'd fallen in love with was anything but pretty lies.

Nothing, nothing, though he'd have searched forever.

He'd been wrong, L finally accepted. Wrong in thinking that Kira and Light were separate. Wrong in thinking Light loved him. Wrong in choosing him over and over. Wrong in all the ways being with Beyond had been.

This was just a repeat performance, with better actors and a final scene that spilled into reality.

He'd always known he was in love with Light, and that now Light hated him. What he hasn't considered (hadn't allowed himself) was that maybe the one who'd loved him back was never Light. It had been Kira. Kira, with the same kind of 'love' Beyond Birthday had.

Was Kira the one he'd loved all along, too?

Some people are like firewood, and they destroy beautiful things that could have been for no other reason than to watch the flames.

L broke.

 _Ten, nine, eight_ …

0o0o0o

L died in the arms of his angel, his angel with their first promise in blue ink on his hands and the words 'I love you' dead in his throat.

(With brown eyes; he would have preferred Kira over a Light who hated him.)

L didn't think anything else could have hurt him then. Light had proved his point, hadn't he? Proved that L wasn't fireproof by burning him to ashes?

For anybody else, it would have been over, but they had promised to take it to the grave.

0o0o0o

Because, angel, people always warned me about the drugs that made you fall asleep for too long, the ones that clouded your perception and made all your choices wrong, the ones that took you to heaven and then threw you into hell. The ones that burned.

What they never told me is that sometimes drugs come as pills and powders and sometimes they come as humans, humans with brown eyes and red strings.

They never told me so much about you, angel, so I had to figure it out myself. And I couldn't, not in time.

Because they never told me that I'd grow to love you like firewood burns only to end like this, with you turning around and kissing me one last time before my name was written down for death.

They never told me that I'd break things and that you'd hate me in the end and that I'd wonder forever why I kept choosing you, if I knew from the start that our last words would be…

' _I win_.'

 **0o0o0o**

 **I have won, haven't I?**

 _ **:: 3 AM, simply**_

 **-LyingMonsters, against the scale of the universe nothing but a few syllables**


	15. Chapter 15

**Humans are drawn to light as much as they run from darkness.**

 **0o0o0o**

 _Six years later_

The quiet hours. Midnight and two o'clock in the morning and four, AM or PM. That was when they talked and said dangerous things. Those were the times, the three times when they'd built a fragile defense against the world.

It should be fitting that the time Light Yagami died was four, the number of death, the number that divided, two into two.

Light, Kira, gods in their own deluded minds.

 _Light, I loved you._

Light, Kira, staggering along a street, each heartbeat a step towards Death, who waited at the end of the road.

 _I could have loved you._

It was all about hearts, wasn't it? Heart attacks, heartbeats that killed instead of fed-didn't they all do that, if you thought about it?-and hearts that had broken and healed wrong, hearts that shredded like tissue paper, hearts that burned too bright and too fast and lit everything around them.

Hearts, beating along red strings, hearts that woke up in the chests of angels and made them take notice of the world below.

Hearts that turned angels, that made them burn and fall and make deals with demons.

 _If circumstances were different._

0o0o0o

 _L? Are you listening? This is from your rival._

Look at me now, L.

I'm dying. I'm bleeding out, and every drop of my blood on the pavement burns.

Six wounds, one for every year without you.

Is this enough for you? Have you hurt me enough now, years after I thought I was finally free?

No...it's never going to be enough. Not for you. I'll never bleed out enough to appease you, will I?

Because I was never good enough. I was a student with a notebook. I was a delusional fanatic screaming 'Justice!'. I was an inconvenience to the game. I was an out-of-place pawn. I was just another person who thought they were more than firewood.

I was nothing but a child addicted too soon, too hard, too fast.

I have never been good enough for you, have I, L?

Not for you. Not for the unattainable image of justice. Not for the World's Greatest Detective. Not even just for you, L the fragile human monster.

I was never enough for you, L, no matter how hard I tried. No matter what I did.

No matter what I said to you.

(Beyond would have done everything better, wouldn't he?)

I became a god. I killed on a scale nobody ever had before. I left blood and ashes in my wake like the Grim Reaper.

I brought entire nations to their knees, and you brought me to mine.

You destroyed me, L. You tore me to shreds and set me aflame, watching the paper scraps like firewood sparks.

I went to lengths more extreme than anybody else. I brought you a rival you'd be sure to see as an equal.

I thought I could be your perfect opponent, and you reduced me to words and lies.

Maybe one of us was a god all along, and one of us was just playing, just borrowing power.

Maybe we were never gods. Maybe we are just an angel and a demon, and your wings and your power reminded me of everything I'd lost, everything I'd given up, everything I left behind when I jumped.

Maybe I realized I wanted all of it back.

Maybe I tried to forget I couldn't. That all deals were permanent, except for the ones between an angel and a demon.

Maybe I used you and burned you and chained you up so you'd never run away. So I could have just one more night of closing my eyes and praying that I'd have wings again when I woke up. One more night where I almost did, because we were so close it almost didn't matter.

And maybe, one day, I turned around and killed you with 'I win' lingering on my kiss because you'd already won every other way.

Because after all this time, I have never been good enough.

Look at me, L.

I am just Light Yagami, an angel with broken wings.

0o0o0o

 _Light, please be listening. It's me. It's L_.

'What if', the words to everything we could never hope to have.

If we'd met and we were normal, or as close as we can get. If the reason I found you was not the Kira Case.

If we'd met in the quiet store nobody else ever goes to, you trying to hide the antidepressants behind your back and me dropping most of the sleeping pills I'm holding.

If you'd picked them up and put them back in my arms. If I flinched when you traced the shadows under my eyes and you pulled back like you'd been burned.

If I'd apologized and my voice was rough from disuse.

If we'd walked out of the store together and you'd suddenly pressed me back against the wall and all I could concentrate on was the bricks and your eyes and that I'd dropped the sleeping pills again.

If you'd asked if I knew the little coffee shop that sold the best cake, and if I was free tomorrow at nine. If I'd said yes, and you'd smiled like I was the first thing you'd seen after years of being blind. If I couldn't take my eyes off that and nearly forgot what the question was because your smile was crooked and gorgeous.

If you'd picked up the boxes and put them back in my arms again. If you'd nearly disappeared when you faced towards the sun and walked away. If I'd forgotten to ask your name until you were gone.

If I'd told myself not to go, but I did. If we'd met and I'd learned your name was Light and you were a college student studying to become a detective like your father, not because you wanted to, but because it was expected for you to get a good job. If I'd promised myself earlier not to tell you anything about me, but faced with those eyes and smile, I broke down and told you that my name was Ryuzaki, that I worked in my family, like you not wanting to, but being expected to.

If we'd talked about whatever came into our minds and I remembered how good it felt to laugh. If, right before it was over, you'd pulled me aside and written a number on my arm and asked, 'Saturday?'

If it had continued like that a thousand times, and we'd reforged each other into keeping a piece of the other's heart forever. If it had started with the kiss I stole in the rain and then the words you whispered in my ear the next time we met and then that night where my body had covered yours, an offering of heat and skin, and you'd accepted.

If the day I walked down the aisle, I dropped the box with the vows because my hands were shaking so badly and you'd picked up the box and put it back in my arms.

If we'd fallen in love slowly, softly, gently, like heartbeats and feathers.

If I hadn't fallen in love with you the way I did in the Kira Case; the way firewood burns. Too fast and hard and sharp with too many sides, letting you turn me to ashes.

If the words you had whispered in our last embrace weren't 'I win', but 'I love you'.

What if, angel, circumstances were different?

Would you have loved me back then?

0o0o0o

Because they never told you so much about humans and how they are living firewood and you will get addicted to watching them burn for you.

Because nobody knows except those who have been there, who have reached out for the demon's hand and gotten pulled into the game, and they are too far gone to tell you anything.

Because the world is not beautiful and you cannot give it to someone, and if you could, it would crush them.

Because the world is too big for one person to change with murder and too small for one person to share with another exactly the same.

Because you and I are angel and demon and we will always be rivals.

Because I always remember our earlier dances and you don't. You never do, and it hurts so much to see your hope every time that somehow, we'll be allowed to stay happy.

Because we are pawns of our god, L, and nothing more. We can't be together. We can't find a way to exist in harmony.

Because you and I are destined to kill each other every single time, and God, I wish I could tell you that it has ended the same way a million times before and will a million times after. But the way you smile is too beautiful to despoil so soon.

Because we are hopelessly addicted to being human and we are always going to be us.

0o0o0o

 _If we were normal, Light, I would have loved you like the world could end and I wouldn't care. I would have woken up next to you, my angel, my Elysium-born creature who chases away all my shadows._

 _But we're not like that and I fear we will never be._

L knelt by Light Yagami as he was dying and told him a story about humans and angels and games and words and firewood that catches everything around it and leaves them branded in it's short life.

It was too late to ask for just one more night.

 _If we were normal, we never would have said 'just for tonight'. But we're not. We'll never be anything but a detective and a suspect. Why did we ever think we could make a relationship work?_

Light Yagami was gasping for breath. Something, somewhere, with raven-black feathers, was opening a notebook and touching a pen to paper. L stared into those red eyes and begged for his Light to come back for one last goodbye.

Nothing.

If you'd asked, L would have denied it. He would have said he saw Light come back, just for a second, but enough for a goodbye.

If you had asked, L would have denied that he shattered when Kira won and Light finally slipped away.

 _I loved you like you were the only illumination in the dark prison I had lived in all my life._

 _I loved you because I'd never unraveled all of your red strings. They held me together_.

He hadn't saved Light.

 _I told you once that you were my biggest mistake. Maybe I was yours, instead. Maybe it took six years for me to realize that. Maybe I fell in love with you, Light, and Kira killed us both. Maybe I was teasing and mocking and playing and falling in love with you, Light, not Kira._

He'd failed at everything.

 _Maybe we had found just the right balance of heat to light, all careful hands and guttering matches, and Kira was standing behind us in all his pyromaniac glory, just wanting to see us charred instead of watch the flames._

Somewhere, a shinigami began to write.

And it was after six years, of waiting, of childish arrogance, of a story that began with 'just one night' and ended with a fallen angel kneeling beside his bittersweet lover and begging for his enemy to win, just to see Light maybe one more time, L realized four things.

One: Kira had already won all those years ago, the moment he'd said three words.

Two: Light was gone, and because L refused to accept that, he prayed for Kira to keep an existence that was torturous for someone he'd said he'd loved.

Three: He'd never fallen in love with the real Light. He'd met barely half a shadow of who Light really was, because he'd met a Light who had already been corrupted by the Death Note and then fallen for one who had that entire part of him ripped out.

Four: If he'd never fallen in love with the real Light because they'd met too late, then the real Light had never done the same to him. Kira had, maybe, with the same take-and-hurt that Beyond had given and he'd tried so hard to escape from in Light.

He'd wanted to give Light the entire world and he'd forgotten that he couldn't.

L's heart finally broke.

 _Kira, you've won…_

0o0o0o

Tap, scratch, tap, tap. The sound of a shinigami who'd played the viewer, writing out the characters for moon, night, and god.

How ironic. L would have laughed at that, maybe.

Light imagined he could hear Ryuk's pen dragging along the paper, severing his lifeline. Would the shinigami make it painless and easy, or make him pay for all the sins he'd committed?

It didn't matter in the end.

Ryuk's pen traced the last line, and a deep shudder went through Light's body, filling him with an abiding peace.

 _This is it, then, Kira._

Forty, thirty-nine, thirty-eight, thirty-seven…

Kira was screaming and denying the act who's clock had been counting down since the second the black notebook had dropped from the sky.

 _Thirty-three, thirty-two, thirty-one_...

Light handed his life over to the shinigami, and they parted ways, their deal at it's end. He gave up the fight to keep his fate out of the hands it had always been in.

 _Twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven..._

He'd given it to L, anyways.

 _Twenty-two, twenty-one, twenty…_

Kira's reign of justice was over.

 _Eighteen, seventeen, sixteen_ …

Light closed his eyes and imagined a night, just one night. He imagined L's kiss one last time, and his bruised skin, and the way he'd say 'I love you'.

 _Twelve, eleven, ten..._

 _I'll see you again, my rival and best friend, the place we'll always end up._

Light Yagami breathed his last in the bloodied staircase where he'd lost the game, held in the arms of his detective, having finally given up.

Just like L, he died with words he'd waited too long to say still forming on his lips.

Four, three, two…

 _Wait_ , Light thought. _L._

 _L, I lo-_

Zero.

0o0o0o

It wasn't supposed to end this way.

It wasn't supposed to end with Light's bloodied body cradled in his arms. It was supposed to end with soft kisses and gentle touches and blue ink and tears, after a long life together, ready to return to heaven.

It was supposed to end differently, and maybe it would have if L had chosen differently all those years ago.

Hadn't chosen his angel.

Maybe they weren't angel and demon after all. Maybe they were simply monsters, kindred monsters.

Not the kind that caused unseen trouble or stole children or sucked away dreams or blood. The worst kind, the ones who wore the human mask so well they almost convinced themselves they enjoyed it.

The kind that devoured to feed a hunger they didn't feel. The most human kind.

They were lying monsters trying to forget that they weren't really human.

0o0o0o

 _I loved you too much, Light._

 _I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Light-kun. I'm sorry for everything. For pretending that I was fireproof. For our games. For not being able to talk normally. And living in our past days and circumstance. I'm sorry for the Kira Case._

L bent down and kissed Light. He kissed Light like the world was ending. He kissed his rival and worst enemy and best friend into darkness and oblivion and the end of nuance and words and _tap scratch tap tap_ patterns.

He felt Light's last breath, soft and wracked with agony. More a gasp than a breath.

He felt the moment when his tortured angel's life ceased and his heart stopped it's march to kneel before Death.

Light Yagami had tried to be a god and died alone in a stairwell, bleeding from six gunshot wounds.

He'd played the judges to reach the top and fallen.

He'd lost their game, six years later.

Light's kiss tasted of blood and sugar and fire. L knew his taste.

L whispered the truth as the last thing they both heard, as a replacement for the words 'I love you'.

' _I win, Light-kun._ '

L saw Light die, and closed his eyes and cried.

 _I'm sorry for falling in love with you._

0o0o0o

This time, it had started when they were seventeen and twenty-four. It didn't always. Maybe somewhere else, it started at twenty and twenty-three.

Light Yagami was seventeen when he picked up the black notebook that fell from the sky and started writing names.

L was twenty-four when he heard about Kira and started to focus more on his new case than Beyond for once.

Light was seventeen when he found his rival taunting him across TV and started playing the game that was offered.

L was twenty-four when Kira became more than his average case because he'd accepted the offer to play.

Light was seventeen when he met the man with messy black hair and dark circles under his eyes and that man became his world.

L was twenty-four when he met the young man with an arrogant smile and sometimes-red, sometimes-brown eyes and that man became his angel.

Light was seventeen when he fell in love with his detective, someone he knew only as L.

L was twenty-four when Kira became more than a killer and took on human form and he fell in love with his main suspect.

Light Yagami was seventeen when he killed his best friend and the side of him that loved the elysian man.

L was twenty-four when Light killed him, and he'd never wished more that it was Kira who dealt the blow instead.

It has been six years since and Light Yagami is twenty-three and his eyes are never red anymore and never will be again. Not this time.

0o0o0o

I told you in the very beginning, angel, that we are nothing but a story with no hero and no villain. We have lived before and will again, because we cannot help falling in love.

It's only human.

We have existed since the beginning, not always the same young man with eyes that are sometimes red and sometimes brown and the raven-haired man with shadows under his eyes, but our story has.

We are destined to fall in love, in a relationship that neither of us deserve, biting as it is, and use each other until we are consumed by the fire we've lit.

We are destined to end the same way every single time. We are destined to whisper 'I win' instead of 'I love you' because it is all we know how to do.

I see the look in your eyes sometimes (yours, not Kira's), and I think you remember how many times we've already done this dance.

I will never tell you that I remember too, because I know what happens when our story is truly done, and I do not ever want you to be hurt like that.

Ours is a story of firewood and falling angels and addiction and I-hate-you-I-love-you. It is the worst and best thing I know, and the only.

Our game will end once we figure out a way to stop breaking beautiful things.

When it's all over, I'll tell you that I love you and that it wasn't just a game.

Please, all I'm asking is that you believe that I'm not lying for once.

0o0o0o

L tore himself into tiny paper pieces that scattered in the wind and caught on blood-crusted hair and fluttered past the remnants of blue-inked promises and rules about worlds and different universes and prisons with gilded bars. All the earthly red strings around him led to Light, and they fluttered in the wind, paper at their ends like the kites that are said to grant wishes.

He became a story of how fast firewood burns and angels, fallen and not, and their gods, and games, and circumstance, and many-sided obsession and the words 'just for tonight'.

Have you heard the story? I'm sure you have. It starts like this.

' _Humans are drawn to light as much as they run from darkness…'_

Does it sound familiar?

It's the story of how L Lawliet fell in love with an angel.

 **0o0o0o**

 **'At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman.'**

 **-Albert Camus**

 **(Do you hear the bells?)**

 _ **:: We are all accidents, attributed to human error, to circumstance, to free will**_

 **-LyingMonsters, the one who thinks about the individual threads in all the red strings**


End file.
